Peter Balsam, PhD

Most of our research investigates how time affects learning and behavior. The idea is that all of our actions and representations of the world are based on temporal knowledge. Many psychiatric and neurological diseases produce a disordered sense of time. Depressed people cannot anticipate good things in their future. Drug addicts are impulsive and have difficulty anticipating delayed consequences. Schizophrenics often have a disordered sense of time. Thus an understanding of the psychology of time and the brain mechanisms that underlie it are likely to provide new ways of approaching these problems. Temporal information processing is modulated by dopamine. Consequently, diseases that involve dysfunction in the dopamine systems (e.g. Parkinson's, schizophrenia, addiction, etc.) may be sensitively assayed by monitoring performance on timing tasks.

It is our lab's goal to translate our basic knowledge of cognitive/behavioral processes into essential tools for diagnosis, monitoring treatment efficacy and drug discovery.