Prof. Stanton wins Pavlovian Investigator Award

Mark Stanton, associate professor of psychology

4:44 p.m., Oct. 20, 2005--Mark Stanton, UD associate professor of psychology, was this year’s recipient of the Pavlovian Investigator Award, a prestigious international award given annually by the Pavlovian Society for distinguished contributions to the field of behavioral neuroscience.

Stanton, who earlier this year attained fellowship status in the American Psychological Association and has written and published widely on his research, received the award for his work on associative learning and his research on how the developing brain learns and remembers.

He received the award at the Pavlovian Society’s annual banquet, after a brief presentation, and said that the announcement came as a surprise to him.

“The award came as complete surprise,” Stanton, who has been a member of the society since 1998, said. “The Pavlovian Society is a fairly small organization composed mostly of experimental researchers and neuroscientists. But, because its members are a fairly distinguished group of scientists, many of whom also are members of the National Academy of Science, I feel especially honored.”

The society honors the tradition of Ivan Pavlov, the early 20th-Century Russian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on digestion. However, he is best known for his subsequent scientific experiments with dogs that led to the discovery of the conditioned reflex, a reaction in animals and humans that makes associative learning subject to objective experimental analysis. The discovery laid the groundwork for many future physiologists, neuroscientists and psychologists who study the relationship between brain and memory.

Stanton applies Pavlov’s principles to research on disorders of human brain development, such as fetal alcohol syndrome and autism.

His studies involve “eyeblink conditioning,” a process in which an association is learned between the sound of a tone and a puff of air to the eyeball of a human or rodent subject. This task makes it possible to analyze brain circuitry underlying associative learning and cognition.

Stanton has published articles on his recent research in Behavioral Neuroscience, Developmental Psychobiology, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and Behavioral Brain Research.

To learn more about Stanton’s work and professional honors, visit [http://w3.psych.udel.edu/people/faculty/stanton.asp].

Article by Becca Hutchinson

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