Dr. Flint's Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory

The programmatic research carried out in my lab is broadly focused on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms and describing the behavioral characteristics of basic learning and memory processes. Experiments primarily involve using rats as an animal model to study phenomena including retrograde amnesia, memory enhancing drugs, infantile amnesia, and the role of medial temporal lobe structures in memory.

Considerable evidence supports the existance of a "consolidation" period immediately following a learning episode during which the recently learned information is processed. While in the consolidation period, memories are susceptible to memory enhancing and memory impairing treatments. Such treatments may also effect the retrievability of particular memories when administered at the time of testing, long after the consolidation period has been completed. Research from our lab has shown that treatments such as acute stress, epinephrine, and glucose may modulate these mnemonic processes. Recently, our lab has been examining the susceptibiliy of old reactivated memories to amnestic agents such as protein synthesis inhibitors. Results support the notion that a memory re-enters a labile state when reactivated and thus becomes susceptible to memory enhancing or memory impairing treatments.