Professor Verity J. Brown

Dopaminergic cell bodies in the substantia nigra pars compacta, staining positively for tyrosine hydroxylase.

The axons leaving this area innervate the neostriatum, one of the major input structures of the basal ganglia. When these midbrain dopaminergic cells cease to function, there is profound motor disturbance, as in Parkinson's disease.

My permanent position is Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews. I am Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London. I currently hold a Royal Society (Industry) Fellowship.

My research is concerned with response control. I am interested in the neural basis of the control of movement and also in investigating psychological (or 'executive') functions, such as attention, expectation and planning which influence and modify processes of response selection.

To these topics, I apply a range of neuroscientific techniques, including psychopharmacology, neurophysiology and analysis of both operant and unconditioned behaviour in humans (healthy volunteers and patient populations) and experimental animals.

Rats readily learn to find food-bait hidden in bowls with different texture coverings (cloth vs smooth), different odours (e.g., cumin or cinnamon) or containing different media (e.g., sand or sawdust). In performing this task, rats develop an attentional bias, or ‘set’, toward the currently relevant stimulus. Learning is slower if they then have to shift their attention to a previously unattended stimulus (Birrell and Brown, 2000: "Medial frontal cortex mediates perceptual attentional set shifting in the rat"; Journal of Neuroscience; 20:4320-4324). This test of mental flexibility is equivalent to tests at which patients with schizophrenia perform poorly. It is used in rats to assess the potential value of novel drug treatments for schizophrenia.