Behavioral and Cognitive Science Research Branch

- Mission
- Program Areas
- Program Announcements
- Contacts

The Behavioral and Cognitive Science Research Branch supports animal research to investigate the behavioral, neurobiological and environmental influences on drug abuse and addiction.

Program Areas

Examples of target areas in the basic behavioral and cognitive sciences, important to the study of vulnerability, addiction, and the acute or long-term consequences of drug abuse:

• Cognitive processes (learning and memory, information processing, attention, inhibition, perception, and problem solving), including the study of animal cognition and use of preclinical models of these cognitive phenomena.
• Social and personality factors (dominance hierarchies, social influence, social values, social attitudes, persuasion, conformity and compliance, group and interpersonal processes, conflict and resolution).
• Environmental influences (conditioned associations, reinforcement history, housing conditions, handling, stress, parenting).
• Biological bases of drug-induced and drug-directed behaviors including cellular and systems neurophysiology (plasticity, channel and receptor function, drug effects on sensory processing); substrates for motivation, cognition, aggression, learning, memory, stress, and drug effects on naturalistic behaviors.
• Behavioral manifestations of chronic neuroadaptive phenomena (e.g., tolerance, sensitization, cross-tolerance and cross-sensitization, withdrawal), including effects of prenatal and perinatal drug exposure.
• Behavior change models (self-control, efficacy, self-management, incentive motivation theory).
• Decision-making, risk-taking, the relationship between sexual behavior and blood-borne disease, including the effects of disease on cognitive processes and behavior.
• Developmental processes (cognition, learning and memory, perception, motor and language development, psychosocial and personality development); especially with a focus on the adolescent period.
• Individual differences (drug reactivity, response to novelty, genetic background).
• Cellular and systems neurophysiology (plasticity, channel and receptor function, drug effects on sensory processing).

Examples of underrepresented areas that the branch is especially interested in include:

• New models for assessing hedonic, euphoriagenic or reinforcing drug effects (e.g., affective continuum, species-specific vocalizations).
• Behavioral choice (behavioral economics theory, alternative reinforcers, multiple-choice test systems).
• Cognitive dysfunction associated with acute, casual and chronic drug use, including memory deficits and effects on higher-order (e.g., executive or inhibitory) function.
• Laboratory models of the development of normal or abnormal, excessive, persistent and/or highly motivated behaviors; comparisons with drug-directed patterns of behavior.
• Studies of the behavioral, cognitive and subjective effects of lesser studied 'club drugs' such as GHB and MDMA.
• Human and animal models of impulsivity and risk-taking.
• Ethological/neuroethological models and approaches.
• Behavioral neurogenetics of model organisms, especially zebrafish and mice.
• Computational neurobiology.
• Behavioral and cognitive factors leading to first use of drugs, escalation to drug abuse and dependence, including the development of new animal models/paradigms to study the phases of addiction and transitions between them, and mimic the chronic, relapsing nature of the addiction process.
• The cognitive processes by which drug-related information is encoded (e.g., emotional memory) and subsequently influence drug-seeking behaviors.
• The motivational, associational, and neurobiological processes underlying craving elicited by different interoceptive, environmental or drug stimuli (e.g., emotional memory).
• The role of social attachment, social interactions, and social influence on the vulnerability to drug abuse behaviors.
• Mechanisms underlying the temporal patterning of drug use (e.g., patterns of craving and binging and the role of patterns of use in the development of dependence, studies of "chippers" or occasional users).
• Interaction between cognitive processes and emotion in drug-seeking and behavior choice (e.g. "hot" versus "cold" cognition).
• Aggression and drug abuse (e.g., aggressor or victim status in modulating responsivity to drugs or susceptibility to drugs or drug cues, drug-induced aggression, dominance-subordinate animal paradigms).

Applicants are encouraged to employ study designs that would permit assessment of gender differences in all of these areas, and models that examine the interaction between biological factors and environmental manipulations.

PAR-11-203: Predictive Multiscale Models for Biomedical, Biological, Behavioral, Environmental and Clinical Research (Interagency U01)

PA-11-049: Women and Sex/Gender Differences in Drug and Alcohol Abuse/Dependence (R03)

PA-11-048: Women and Sex/Gender Differences in Drug and Alcohol Abuse/Dependence (R21)

PA-11-047: Women and Sex/Gender Differences in Drug and Alcohol Abuse/Dependence (R01)

PAS-10-226: Advancing Novel Science in Women's Health Research (ANSWHR) (R21)

PA-10-106: Scientific Meetings for Creating Interdisciplinary Research Teams (R13)

PA-10-008: Mechanisms, Models, Measurement, & Management in Pain Research (R03)

PA-10-007: Mechanisms, Models, Measurement, & Management in Pain Research (R21)

PA-10-006: Mechanisms, Models, Measurement, & Management in Pain Research (R01)

PA-09-099: Mechanisms of Alcohol and Nicotine Co-Dependence (R01)

PA-09-098: Mechanisms of Alcohol and Nicotine Co-Dependence (R21)

PA-09-046: Testing Tobacco Products Promoted to Reduce Harm (R01)

Division Contact Information

Branch Contacts

Minda Lynch, Ph.D.
Chief
(301) 435-1322

Dr. Lynch is presently the Branch Chief of the BCSRB and chair of NIDA's Trans-divisional Behavioral Science Working group. Dr. Lynch received her Ph.D. in Biopsychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. Following NIDA-sponsored post-doctoral training in neuropsychopharmacology, she established an independent program of preclinical investigation at the SUNY Health Science Center and V.A. Medical Center in Syracuse, New York. As a Department of Veterans Affairs Merit Review awardee for eleven years, she supervised a multidisciplinary research program to investigate the neurobiological substrates underlying: (a) motivated behaviors (e.g., response to conditioned incentive stimuli previously paired with primary drug reward), and (b) animal behavioral models of human psychopathology. As research faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and the multidisciplinary Graduate Neuroscience Program at SUNY she also served as course coordinator for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, and was responsible for medical student instruction in Neurotransmitters and Behavior and Pathophysiological Substrates of Psychiatric Disorders. She joined NIDA as a program official in the BCSRB in 1998. She is interested in the role of associative processes in all phases of addiction, in models of relapse (e.g., reinstatement or priming), and in creative behavioral models or paradigms that expand our present conceptualization of the motivation for drug abuse (e.g., drug effects on affect, loss-of-control, alternative reinforcers, changing behavioral repertoires).

Samia Noursi, Ph.D.
Women and Sex/Gender Differences Research Deputy Coordinator and Health Scientist Administrator
(301) 443-1887

Dr. Noursi holds a Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of Maryland and was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Prior to joining NIDA, she was a Social Science Analyst in the Division of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health. Before her employment with NIH, she held a position as Research Director for the National Child Welfare Resource Center on Legal and Judicial Issues, Center on Children and the Law at the American Bar Association. She has research history in both longitudinal design and study into the effects of domestic violence on children's development. At BCSRB, Dr. Noursi assists the NIDA's Women and Sex/Gender Differences Research Coordinator in providing leadership for NIDA's Women and Sex/Gender Differences Research Program. In addition, she serves as Program Officer with a portfolio that focuses on gender differences in the antecedents and consequences of drug abuse, study of vulnerability to drug abuse, and study of the behavioral effects of prenatal exposure to drugs.

Dave Thomas, Ph.D.
Health Scientist Administrator
(301) 443-1887

Programmatic areas of interest include pain and analgesia, opioids, the abuse liability of analgesics and virtual reality technologies.

Susan Volman, Ph.D.
Health Scientist Administrator
(301)435-1315

Dr. Susan Volman oversees a program that emphasizes a systems neurobiology approach in animal models, including electrophysiological recording of neural activity during drug-related activities; studies of learning and memory systems to elucidate how normal processes of neuronal plasticity contribute to drug addiction; and computational approaches to understanding the effects of drug-induced alterations on neural circuits. She is particularly interested in the adaptation of neuroethological and neurogenetic model systems for the study of drug addiction processes. Dr. Volman obtained her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University in 1985 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. She was a faculty member in the Department of Zoology and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Studies Program and the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University and then served as Director of Developmental Neuroscience at NSF before coming to NIDA in 1998. Dr. Volman has carried out NIH-funded research in a variety of neuroethological model systems with a common theme of neural circuit re-organization underlying behavioral change in response to injury, natural selection, and during ontogeny. Her most recent research had been on song learning in birds. She has served on the editorial board of Brain, Behavior, and Evolution and on the review panel for the Behavioral and Computational Neuroscience Programs at NSF.

Cora Lee Wetherington, Ph.D.
Women and Sex/Gender Differences Research Coordinator and Health Scientist Administrator
(301) 435-1319

As a Program Officer in the BCSRB, Dr. Cora Lee Wetherington oversees a program of research that largely focuses on study of gender differences in the antecedents and consequences of drug abuse, study of vulnerability to drug abuse, and study of the behavioral effects of prenatal exposure to drugs. Dr. Wetherington also serves as the Women and Gender Research Coordinator for NIDA (http://www.nida.nih.gov/WHGD/WHGDHome.html), and as such serves as NIDA's representative to the NIH Coordinating Committee of the Office of Research on Women's Health and as Chair of NIDA's Women and Gender Research Group. She also serves on the Editorial Board of NIDA NOTES. Prior to joining NIDA in 1987 she was a tenured faculty member of the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where for 12 years she taught and conducted research in animal learning and behavior with support from NIH and NSF. Dr. Wetherington received her Ph.D. in 1976 in experimental psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a Fellow of Divisions 25 and 28 of the American Psychological Association and has served on the board of editors of The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and The Behavior Analyst and has conducted guest reviews for many other journals.