Ceyhun
Sunsay
Department of Psychology
Indiana University
1101 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
csunsay@indiana.edu
Welcome
My main interest is how associative learning occurs in animals. One useful paradigm to study associative learning is Pavlovian conditioning. This paradigm shows that animals are capable of building an association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) such as a tone or buzzer and an unconditioned stimulus (US) such as a food pellet. Currently, I am investigating the associations of the context with conditioned stimuli (CSs) and whether they impact the building of CS-US associations. Another issue that I am interested in is how the concept of time can be incorporated to the theories of Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments I ran in the past showed that, although some models have the potentials, none of the existing models is adequate to explain the effects of time in learning. I plan to run some experiments that will follow up those I ran in the past.
Another interest of mine is to correlate real-time measurements of neural
activities with learning. One such measurement is obtained by fast-cyclic
scan voltammetry. This technique measures the amount of dopamine release
in the extracellular space in almost real-time (100 ms resolution). I
believe such techniques can be very useful in animal learning research
if they provide reliable neural measures of several cognitive processes
such as attention, arousal, and memory decay which are hard to study with
pure behavioral Pavlovian conditioning paradigms in animals due to their
dynamic nature.
Ceyhun Sunsay is currently a faculty member
at Franklin and Marshall College.
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