Principal Investigators //
- David Bridwell, PhD >
- Vince Calhoun, PhD >
- Arvind Caprihan, PhD >
- Zikuan Chen, PhD >
- Vince Clark, PhD
- Eric D. Claus, PhD >
- Carla Harenski, PhD >
- Kent Hutchison, PhD >
- Kent A. Kiehl, PhD >
- Jeffrey D. Lewine, PhD >
- Jingyu Liu, PhD >
- Andrew R. Mayer, PhD >
- John Phillips, MD >
- Sergey Plis, PhD >
- Matthew Shane, PhD >
- Julia M. Stephen, PhD >
- Jing Sui, PhD >
- Jessica Turner, PhD >
- Qingbao Yu, PhD >
Vince Clark, PhD
Professor of Translational Neuroscience
Dr. Clark has worked with MRN as Director of Neuroscience, then as Scientific Director recruiting scientists and helping MRN to increase its grant portfolio by expanding into new areas of research such as addiction, accelerated learning, and multimodal imaging. In association with the Department of Psychology at UNM (http://psych.unm.edu), where he is Founding Director of the new Clinical Neuroscience Center, he and his associates investigate the relationship between mind and brain. He employs structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), event-related potentials (ERPs) and methods of transcranial brain stimulation, including transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), 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, attention and language in healthy individuals. He also uses these methods to examine the neural basis of psychiatric disorders such as drug and gambling addiction, psychopathy and schizophrenia. He is developing new methods of data analysis for combining data from different imaging techniques to gain fundamentally new information on human brain structure and function, and is using this and other methods to expand the boundaries of brain imaging techniques. His recent area of research examines how tDCS can be used to increase learning and performance in healthy subjects, and the mechanisms by which tDCS produces changes in brain function and behavior. Brain stimulation may lead to a variety of innovations in classroom education and professional training, along with new treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders.
For more information on Dr. Clark, please refer to his Curriculum Vitae.
Selected Publications //
- Neuropsychological analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations. >
- Diminished Auditory Sensory Gating during Active Auditory Verbal Hallucinations >
- Functional MRI Evaluation of Multiple Neural Networks Underlying Auditory Verbal Hallucinations… >
- The role of the frontopolar cortex in manipulation of integrated information in working memory >
- Baseline effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on glutamatergic neurotransmission…... >
- Reduced fMRI activity predicts relapse in patients recovering from stimulant dependence >
- A history of randomized task designs in fMRI >
- Altered small-world brain networks in schizophrenia patients during working memory performance. >
- TDCS guided using fMRI significantly accelerates learning to identify concealed objects >
- A baseline for the multivariate comparison of resting-state networks. >
- Discrete dynamic Bayesian network analysis of fMRI data. >
- Smoking status as a potential confound in the BOLD response of patients with schizophrenia >
- Responses to rare visual target and distractor stimuli using event-related fMRI. >
- An fMRI study of face perception and memory using random stimulus sequences >
- Spatial selective attention affects early extrastriate but not striate components of the visual… >
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.
