I am an Associate Fellow working at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. My research is focused on the discovery of the neural processes that underlie decision making and spatial navigation.
Decision-Making Every decision has its cost. When choosing to exceed the speed limit, the cost of receiving a ticket can be weighed against the benefit of arriving on time. Alternatively, the effort involved in a daily exercise routine can be contrast against the benefit of a healthier body. The process by which the brain integrates such costs and benefits in order to produce a decision is an open question in neuroscience, and although the study of the neural mechanisms of decision making is in its infancy, the implications of understanding these processes are clear. For instance, deficits in decision making are commonly associated with normal aging. Furthermore disorders such as chronic gambling may result from damage to neural systems involved in the weighing of short-term benefits against long-term costs. In fact, human patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex appear to have a “myopia for the future” (Bechara, 2000) in that their decisions are guided by immediate consequences even in the midst of rising future punishments or declining future rewards. My present research is largely focused on understanding the neural substrates of cost-benefit decision making. We have developed a novel behavioral task in which rats must weigh the cost (climb a large barrier) over the benefit (varying levels of food reward) for different choices (choosing between doors on in a maze). In this tasks, rats must choose between paths on a maze that are associated with a different combinations of effort and reward.
Spatial Navigation Knowing one's location in the world is critical for any organism that has to address question such as… Where did I 
store my winter cache of nuts? Where is my nest? Where did I put the car keys? How do I get to the supermarket? Answering these question requires neural machinery that can process evidence from configurations of cues (e.g. road signs, buildings in the distance, the location of a particular tree, etc…) and combine it with ‘self-motion’ information that indicates one’s trajectory through the environment (e.g. acceleration and rotation). It is clear that the hippocampus is a critical structure for the integration such information. For example, animals and humans with damage to the hippocampus exhibit profound deficits in their capacity to navigate through space. Furthermore, neurons in the hippocampus respond with extreme precision to the exact location of an animal within an environment. I am currently investigating how self-motion information is integrated into the hippocampal representation of space.
References Bechara, A., D. Tranel, et al. (2000). "Characterization of the decision-making deficit of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions." Brain 123 (Pt 11): 2189-202.
Publications
Cowen, S.L. and McNaughton, B.L (2007). Selective delay activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the rat: The contribution of sensory-motor information and contingency. Journal of Neurophysiology, 98(1):303-16.
Maurer,A.P., Cowen, S.L., Burke, S.N., Barnes, C.A. and McNaughton, B.L. (2006) Organization of hippocampal cell assemblies based on theta phase precession. Hippocampus, 16:785-794.
