Dr. Bill DeCoteau
St. Lawrence University News
Submitted by bdecotea on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 09:14.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Courses I teach regularly:
Introductory Psychology
Physiological Psychology
Animal Behavior
Cognitive Neuropsychology
My research interests:
My research focuses on the interactions between the basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex during the learning and retention of behavioral tasks. I’m also interested in studying animal models of human disease conditions. Joe Erlichman in the biology department and I are currently collaborating on a project that examines the neurobiology of panic disorder.
Sample student projects I have supervised:
Basal Ganglia and High-Order Cognition: Effects of Ventral Striatum Lesions on Behavioral Flexibility
Effects of CO2 Exposure on Elevated Plus-Maze Measurements of Anxiety
Knowing What Goes Where: Effects of Prefrontal Cortex Lesions on Visual Scene Discriminations
Examples of presentations, exhibitions, performances and published work:
DeCoteau, W.E, Thorne, C., Gibson D.J., Courtemanche, R., Mitra, P., Kubota, Y., and Graybiel, A.M. Learning-related coordination of striatal and hippocampal theta rhythms during acquisition of a procedural maze task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007; 104:5644-9.
DeCoteau, W.E, Thorne, C., Gibson D.J., Courtemanche, R., Mitra, P., Kubota, Y., and Graybiel, A.M. Oscillations of local field potentials in the rat dorsal striatum during spontaneous and instructed behaviors. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2007; 97:3800-5.
DeCoteau WE, Fessler CL, and Benson AR. Effects of striatum lesions on the successive acquisition of response- and place-based learning rules. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 2007