Models of adolescent drug use and its consequences. Recent concerns surround the impact of drug abuse - particularly binge drinking, inhalant abuse and cannabis use - on the mental health of adolescents. Early drug use is associated with mental health problems although the mechanisms involved are not well characterised. The present proposal aims to use animal models to characterise substance abuse that occurs during the adolescent period and to investigate its effects on brain and behaviour. Inc ....Models of adolescent drug use and its consequences. Recent concerns surround the impact of drug abuse - particularly binge drinking, inhalant abuse and cannabis use - on the mental health of adolescents. Early drug use is associated with mental health problems although the mechanisms involved are not well characterised. The present proposal aims to use animal models to characterise substance abuse that occurs during the adolescent period and to investigate its effects on brain and behaviour. Increasing our knowledge of the causes and consequences of adolescent drug abuse will improve Australia's ability to confront this problem and to develop early interventions and treatments that minimise associated harms.Read moreRead less
Normal and abnormal processes of social attention orienting. Human beings are capable of rapidly detecting the direction of another person's eye-gaze and shifting attention reflexively in that direction. This project will compare shifts of attention to non-social and social cues of direction to determine whether attentional shifts to gaze-direction are fast because humans are biologically hard-wired to respond to social cues of evolutionary significance (eyes) or because humans are well-practice ....Normal and abnormal processes of social attention orienting. Human beings are capable of rapidly detecting the direction of another person's eye-gaze and shifting attention reflexively in that direction. This project will compare shifts of attention to non-social and social cues of direction to determine whether attentional shifts to gaze-direction are fast because humans are biologically hard-wired to respond to social cues of evolutionary significance (eyes) or because humans are well-practiced at using a number of different signals for direction in their environment. Findings from this work will than be used to investigate whether a selective impairment of responding to gaze-direction contributes to the social impairments so characteristic of people with schizophrenia.
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