Cynthia Gooch, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Sergievsky Center
630 West 168th Street, Box 16
New York, NY 10032
Phone: 212-305-2046
Fax: 212-342-1838
email: cgooch@sergievsky.cpmc.columbia.edu
Ongoing Research:
Cognitive aging and time perception. Many of the cognitive processes that undergo a decline with age are also those processes that subserve the sensation of time passing. Some of these are attention, working memory, and reaction time. With that in mind, I am interested in the relative contributions of these information-processing components to interval timing, and in what manner changes in these components produce a change in timing behavior.
Neurophysiology of interval timing. Given the detailed cognitive models that have been developed to explain the perception of time in the seconds-to-minutes range, relatively little is known about the neural basis of how these models are implemented. I am using in vivo electrophysiological recording to investigate neural firing patterns that correlate with behavioral measures indicative of timing in animal models.
Representative Publications
Gooch, C.M., Wiener, M., Portugal, G.S. & Matell, M.S. (submitted). Methamphetamine alters the timing of discrete but not sustained nosepoke responding on the peak-interval procedure. Brain Research.