Psychology 336 

 The goal of research in behavioral neuroscience is to understand behavior in terms of the neural substrates that are responsible for the orchestration of those behaviors. It is the primary purpose of this course to give the student hands-on experience in the field of behavioral neuroscience and, hopefully, provide some of the knowledge and empirical skills which will facilitate the design and execution of research in this field.

The specific content of the course changes each time it is taught, although the general objectives mentioned above remain the same.  For the last semester in which this course was taught (Spring 1999), we spent the first several weeks of the semester looking at a particular behavior ( rough-and-tumble play in juvenile rats ) and how one neural system (mesolimbic dopamine) might be involved in that behavior. We then take a broader look at the brain's involvement in emotions by reading and discussing selections from Jaak Panksepp's book on Affective Neuroscience. To complement what we were covering in class and to give some bearings on what was possible within the constraints of our resources, we did an initial experiment as a class which looked at the effects of lesioning a particular brain area on play behavior in the rat.  In this study, students were able to participate in a procedure wherein the dopamine neurotoxin 6-hydroxydopamine was surgically administered into the nucleus accumbens of juvenile rats.  After a recovery period, the play behavior of lesioned rats was assessed when paired with control animals.  While all this was going on, students (who were divided into groups of three) came up with a testable hypothesis of their own and spent the rest of the semester testing these hypotheses.

Here's some of the class from Spring 1999, along with Jaak Panksepp (far right), at an end-of the-year picnic at the Siviy house.