Principal Investigators //
- Corey Hill Allen, PhD >
- Nathaniel Anderson, PhD >
- Vince Calhoun, PhD >
- Felicha Candelaria-Cook, PhD >
- Arvind Caprihan, PhD >
- Vince Clark, PhD
- Eric D. Claus, PhD >
- Aparna Gullapalli, PhD >
- Carla Harenski, PhD >
- Jon Houck, Ph.D. >
- Kent Hutchison, PhD >
- Kent A. Kiehl, PhD >
- Dean O. Kuethe, PhD >
- Jeffrey D. Lewine, PhD >
- J. Michael Maurer, PhD >
- Andrew R. Mayer, PhD >
- John Phillips, MD >
- Sephira Ryman, PhD, MS >
- Julia M. Stephen, PhD >
- Andrei Vakhtin, Ph.D. >
- Claire E. Wilcox, MD >
Vince Clark, PhD
Adjunct Professor of Translational Neuroscience
Director Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center (PCNC)
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.
Selected Publications //
- Electrical stimulation of cranial nerves in cognition and disease >
- Transcranial direct current stimulation facilitates category learning >
- Transcranial electrical and magnetic stimulation (tES and TMS) for addiction medicine: A consensus paper on the present state of the science and the road ahead >
- Coordinated, multimodal neuromodulation and neuroimaging >
- The benefits of closed-loop transcranial alternating current stimulation on subjective sleep quality >
- Increased excitability induced in the primary motor cortex by transcranial ultrasound stimulation. >
- Closed-loop tACS delivered during slow-wave sleep enhances consolidation of generalized information. >
- Rigor and reproducibility in research with transcranial electrical stimulation: An NIMH-sponsored workshop >
- The ethical, moral and pragmatic rationale for brain augmentation >
- Battery powered thought: A review of methods for cognitive enhancement using transcranial direct current stimulation >
- Neuroinflammation, neuroautoimmunity, and the co-morbidities of complex regional pain syndrome >
- Suppression of movement disorders by jaw realignment >
- Reduced fMRI activity predicts relapse in patients recovering from stimulant dependence >
- A history of randomized task designs in fMRI >
- TDCS guided using fMRI significantly accelerates learning to identify concealed objects >
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.
