Principal Investigators //


Vince Clark, PhD

Adjunct Professor of Translational Neuroscience
Director Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center (PCNC)

Vince Clark

Dr. Clark is the Founding Director of the Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center at UNM (http://psych.unm.edu), where he and his associates investigate the relationship between mind and brain and are developing new methods of combined brain stimulation and imaging to accelerate learning and treat illness. Dr. Clark’s ultimate goals are to combine brain stimulation with neuroimaging to broaden our understanding of the human brain and cognition, to develop innovations in learning and education, and to develop new treatments based on neuromodulation to reduce the suffering caused by psychiatric and neurological disorders. He employs structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), event-related potentials (ERPs) and methods of transcranial brain stimulation, including transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) including tDCS, tRNS and tACS, transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM), as well as other methods to examine human brain structure and function. Using these tools, he is investigating the basic organizational principles of perception, learning, memory, sleep, attention and language in healthy people. He also uses these methods to examine the neural basis of clinical disorders, such as drug use and addiction, psychotic disorders including schizophrenia and forms of dementia including Alzheimer’s disease, among others.  His recent area of research examines how brain stimulation can be used to increase learning and performance in healthy subjects, and the mechanisms by which these methods produce changes in brain function and behavior.

 

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Effects of Brain Stimulation on Attention, Perception and Learning

We have recently found that tDCS increases performance and learning in a difficult visual learning task (Clark et al. 2012), and that this same tDCS protocol increases the combined concentration of glutamate and glutamine, as well as NAA (Clark et al. 2011), suggesting neurochemical mechanisms by which tDCS increases learning and performance.  Our current studies examine the cognitive effects of tDCS, specifically which components of cognition are altered by different tDCS protocols, which well help us to understand the cognitive mechanisms of tDCS enhancement, and may suggest other research and clinical applications of tDCS.  Future planned studies will examine the neurophysiological and neurochemical effects of tDCS using an MRI-compatible tDCS system, in collaboration with the newly formed Clinical Neuroscience Center in the Department of Psychology at UNM, where Dr. Clark is Director.  We are also collaborating with other groups around the country who have developed more effective mechanisms of targeting brain stimulation, including a new method for 3D targeting that may provide the ability to stimulate deep brain structures while leaving more superficial structures unaffected.