The Neuroscience Laboratory at the Wm. Jennings Bryan Dorn
VA Medical Center was started by Thomas R. Scott in 1956 just after the
nationwide VA research program was begun. The current Hospital Director, or as
they were known at that time the Hospital Manager, became aware that additional
money was available for VA Hospitals with research programs and having been
told by one of his medical staff that psychologists "did research",
he should hire a psychologist to begin his research program. Bob Scott was
working at the South Carolina State Hospital at the time. He was a recent Ph.D.
graduate of the University of Nebraska and had a reputation for being a
"hard nosed" researcher. He was thus recruited by the Chief
Psychologist at the Columbia, SC VA Hospital to begin a research program
involving psychological and/or neuropsychiatric research.
For
several years Dr. Scott pursued a research program supported by the VA Research
and Development Service in Washington, DC, which researched the use of motion
aftereffects as a diagnostic tool for distinguishing between functional
neuropsychiatric illnesses and organic brain damage. The hypothesis was that
organic damage would adversely affect motion aftereffects whereas functional
diseases, as they were known at the time, such as schizophrenia would not. For
several years Bob then used a device which he developed for quantitatively
assessing the magnitude of the motion aftereffect generated by an Archimedes
Spiral. He used an oscilloscope image of a circle which could be made to expand
or contract at pre-established rates controlled by the experimenter to
counteract the inward or outward going visual field generated by a previously
viewed Archimedes Spiral. This research lead to several early publications by
Dr. Scott and his colleagues.
Bob also developed an animal model
for studying motion aftereffects using a similar apparatus with rhesus monkeys.
Rhesus monkeys were trained to respond to a contracting or expanding circle on
the oscilloscope after having observed a rotating Archimedes Spiral and in this
way the extent of their motion aftereffect could be estimated. This early
research on monkeys also lead to several publications.
In 1969
Bob became interested in pursuing an administrative and clinical career in the
VA and left the VA research program to become Chief Psychologist at the Dorn VA
Medical Center and Donald Powell was then recruited to take over the role as
the head of the laboratory. At this time it became known as the VA Neuroscience
Laboratory. The direction of the research changed to focus more on learning and
memory and the special relationship between the emotional accompaniments of
learning and memory, using the rabbit as an animal model. Don Powell received
his Ph.D. from Florida State University and worked for 2 years as a
post-doctoral fellow at the University of Miami with Neil Schneiderman who was
one of Dorie Gormezano's Ph.D.'s from Indiana. The major thrust of Dr.
Schneiderman's research on the rabbit was to emphasize the autonomic
accompaniments of the eyeblink conditioning paradigm which Dr. Gormezano and
Neil had developed at Indiana.
Dr.Powell's
research continued to emphasize both basic animal models as well as clinical research
as derived from the earlier models used by Bob Scott. The clinical research
program focused mainly on geriatrics and the interaction of psychosocial and
physiological factors in determining the adaptation of the elderly person using
primarily VA patients as subjects. The animal work on learning and memory and
its application to aging continued as parallel research programs in the
Neuroscience Laboratory until the early 60's when classical conditioning was
developed in the Neuroscience Laboratory as a way of assessing learning and
memory in old and young rabbits. Classical conditioning was then subsequent
applied to aging problems in human populations through a grant from the
National Institute on Aging.
During
this period several graduate students and post-doctoral associates came through
the Neuroscience Laboratory, one of whom was Shirley Buchanan, who for her
doctoral dissertation determined that the midline anteromedial cortex of the
rabbit was necessary for learned cardiac adjustments using the typical
classical conditioning eyeblink paradigm. She found that damage to the
anteromedial prefrontal and cingulate cortex completely abolished learned
cardiac adjustments, while having no effect on learned eyeblink discrimination.
Shirley received her Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and after
brief post-doctoral work in the Neuroscience Laboratory became a VA-funded
investigator in her own right and remained a funded investigator until her
death June 19, 1998. At this time the laboratory to commerate her contribution
to the VA Neuroscience Laboratory as well as the Neuroscience community at
large, both nationally and internationally, the laboratory was named for Dr.
Buchanan. Her work has been continued under the present VA investigators in a
variety of ways.