Thursday 10/12, 3:30 PM: Manoj Doss, “Psychoactive Drugs and Memory Distortion”

Our inaugural Cognition Workshop will take place this Thursday (10/12/2017), from 3:30 – 5:00 pm in Harper 140. Refreshments and snacks will be served.

Our first speaker will be ​Manoj Doss, a graduate student in Psychology, presenting:

Psychoactive Drugs and Episodic Memory Distortion.

Abstract: The effects of recreational drugs on learning and memory have been well-studied in animal models of reward-learning and conditioning. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding how these drugs affect episodic memory, which may be particularly relevant for human drug-taking behavior. Distortion of episodic memory, especially emotional episodic memory, may underlie failures in realizing when drug use becomes abuse, but such distortions may also be important components to certain drugs’ therapeutic potential. For example, Δ⁹-tetrahydrocanbinol (THC), the main psychoactive constituent in marijuana, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) impair cognition, yet they are both currently being explored for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disorder characterized by various memory abnormalities including aberrant, negative recollections. In two studies, we tested the effects of THC and MDMA on emotional memory encoding and retrieval in healthy volunteers. Although both drugs were found to impair memory encoding, these effects were greater for emotional memory. At retrieval, MDMA was found to have similar, though less reliable effects to those at encoding, and THC was simply found to increase false memories. In a final experiment, we explored which hippocampally-dependent processes THC disrupts at encoding and found that whereas perceptual specificity in memory was compromised, item-context bindings appeared to be spared. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to PTSD.

You can read an overview of  Manoj’s work here and find his published work on Google Scholar or ResearchGate.