Identifier

94

Hunter Nolen

Date

2017

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Major

Psychology

Concentration

Behavioral Neuroscience

Committee Member

Helen Sable

Committee Member

Melloni Cook

Abstract

The P300 is a neurological signal that has been identified as a valid endophenotypic indicator of various psychopathologies such as drug addiction and alcoholism. To date, methods of analyzing the P300 amongst humans and animals have been disparate. Thus, the present study pioneered a unique operant paradigm that can be used to train rodents to perform an active discrimination task that is necessary in order to study the P300 in a manner that is analogous to human subjects. Rats selectively bred to differ in alcohol preference were trained to actively discriminate between a rare and more frequent standard auditory stimulus via lever pressing. As hypothesized, alcohol preferring (P) rats were not handicapped in their performance on the task which allows the confirmation that any differences later observed in P300 amplitude or latency were not a result of differences in the rats' ability to detect the target stimulus.

Comments

Undergraduate Honor's Thesis

Library Comment

Honors thesis originally submitted to the Local University of Memphis Honor’s Thesis Repository.

Notes

Data is provided by the student.

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