Our PI is to give a talk on the foundations and current state of behavioral neuroscience as part of the Brain Awareness Week at 2pm on Sunday March 21!
Our BAP project "Of rats and robots: A mutual learning paradigm" received lots of attention by the media, following DHA's visit to the lab:
Alev, Beyza and Melisa left our lab after 3 years of scientific endeavor and fun. Accustomed to carry out a tremendous amount of work and desperate to make discoveries, Alev, Beyza and Melisa are respectively admitted to Ph.D. programs at UConn, Rutgers and Cornell. We wish them the best of luck in their future studies!
Our new publication, made possible by Nilay Atesyakar, investigates the relationship between cognitive competence and behavioral despair. We revealed that rats with low cognitive competence as assessed by learning performance in the Y-Maze, but not in the radial arm maze (!), were significantly more vulnerable to behavioral despair. In contrast, rats with high cognitive competence were resilient to the negative effects of the forced swim test, irrespective of the spatial memory task used.
Asst. Prof. Ünal recently guested on Mirgün Cabas and Can Kozanoğlu's podcast Nereden Başlasam? (where to start?), discussing what neuroscience is and where it is heading in the near future.
The 30-minute podcast is released on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6O7PH7tqLiERxXfxY9mIhB