Search the faculty site
For media inquiries or to contact a faculty expert, please contact Media Relations:
Phone: 212.854.2037
Email: mediarelations@barnard.edu
Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
peter d. balsam
Professor of Psychology and Samuel R. Milbank Chair
Peter D. Balsam, Professor of Psychology and Samuel R. Milbank Chair, joined the Barnard faculty in 1975. He teaches such courses as Animal Cognition; Introduction to Statistics; Psychology of Learning; Senior Research Seminars; and Theories of Learning.
Professor Balsam seeks to understand how animals use temporal information to solve problems in flexible ways. His ongoing projects investigate the way that time is perceived, encoded and retrieved by animals and how this information guides their decisions about whether, when, and how to respond. He studies the brain mechanisms that underlie this very important aspect of adaptive behavior.
Selected Publications
"Target-Absent Controls in Blocking Experiments with Rats" (with K. M. Taylor, et al.), Learning & Behavior (in press)
"Transient Overexpression of Striatal D_2 Receptors Impairs Operant Motivation and Interval Timing" (with M.R. Drew, et al.), Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007)
"Classical Conditioned Learning Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" (with B. Luber, et al.), Experimental Brain Research 183 (2007)
"A 'Good Parent' Function for Dopamine: Transient Modulation of Learning and Performance During Early Stages of Training" (with J. C. Horvitz, et al.), in Reward and Decision-making in Cortico-Basal Ganglia Networks, ed. B. Balleine, et al. (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2007)
"Amphetamine Affects the Start of Responding and Response Rate in the Peak Interval Timing Task" (with K. M. Taylor and J. Horvitz), Behavioural Processes 74 (2007)
"Pavlovian Contingencies and Temporal Uncertainty" (with S. Fairhurst and C. R. Gallistel), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 32 (2006)
"Mice with Chronically Elevated Dopamine Exhibit Enhanced Motivation, But Not Learning, for a Food Reward" (with B. Cagniard, et al.), Neuropsychopharmacology 31 (2006)
"Dopamine Blockade Unlike Extinction Affects Behavioral Variability" (with J. H. Rick and J. C. Horvitz), Behavioral Neuroscience 120 (2006)212.854.5312
Please cc mediarelations@barnard.edu
EDUCATION:
M.A., Ph.D., University of North Carolina
B.A., SUNY, Stony Brook
RELATED LINKS:
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Behavioral neuroscience
Learning, memory and cognition