Reed College
Project Title: Producing Defections in an Animal Model of Impulsive Choice
Katherine Garland received her Bachelor of Arts at Reed College, where she first fell in love with behavioral research. As a graduate student researcher pursuing a PhD at Utah State University under the mentorship of Dr. Gregory Madden, Katherine has continued her foray into the depths of research with her ever-helpful (though not always perfectly cooperative) rodent subjects to detangle the complex web of how to influence behavior. In particular, she has an interest in impulsive behavior, delay discounting and the creation of basic behavioral interventions to increase self-controlled decisions.
As Katherine herself could tell you, all people engage in defections, wherein one initially chooses to wait for a delayed but valuable reward, but before receiving that outcome, goes back on that choice to select a sooner and less valuable reward instead. In everyday life, defections can take the form of balking on a diet to pop into a pastry shop instead, giving up the long-term reward of weight loss. A person attempting to quit smoking could defect from their choice of healthy lungs when they relapse and reach for a cigarette. We all know defections occur every day. Nonetheless, producing them in a lab environment is a difficult prospect. However, to learn how to prevent defections from a self-controlled choice to an impulsive one, defections must be predictably and reliable produced in a lab setting. With the support of SABA and the Madden Lab, Katherine will embark on a study using a new method to reliably produce defections in a laboratory rodent model.
Using the hyperbolic model of delay discounting as a basis, this study aims to create a method to find the point in time in which the subjects’ preference switches from the delayed, valuable outcome to the immediate but less valuable outcome, and to present the choice to defect at that precise moment, accompanied by cues that signal the availability of the less valuable outcome (not unlike the scent of a tempting pastry or the sight of a cigarette carton). Using this method, the rodent subjects are predicted to consistently defect. In time, the methods used here may be used as the basis for future studies on defections – and, importantly, how to prevent defections from occurring.
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