- Department
- Email Address
- [email protected]
- Research Areas
- Research Keywords
-
- adult neurogenesis
- behaviour
- brain size
- cognition
- comparative neuroanatomy
- conditioning
- Ecology and evolution
- ecophysiology
- fire-bellied toad
- fishes
- Freshwater ecosystems
- learning and memory
- motivation
- neurobiology
- neurophysiology
- neurotoxicology
- phenotypic plasticity/flexibility
- Physiology
- Toxicology
- Research Description
My lab works on:
1) Animal cognition: laboratory tasks and field tests
2) Neuroecology: influence of ecology and environmental factors on brain size
3) Ecophysiology: indicators of ecological performance and chronic stress in aquatic wildlife- Research Summary
Work in the Laberge lab attempts to understand how variation in brain structure and size influences organismic function, and identify the factors that drive evolution and plasticity of the nervous system. Current projects on this topic study variation in structure and size of the brain in populations of fish and amphibians, the proximate mechanisms generating this variation, and the functional consequences of this variation. Additionally, the lab is involved in collaborative efforts aiming to develop novel indicators of ecological performance and chronic stress in wild fish.
- Techniques Used
Behavioural assays, prey catching conditioning, histology, tract-tracing, immunohistochemistry, functional neuroanatomy, in vitro intracellular electrophysiology.
- Lab Equipment
ABET touch screen system, plus-maze, aquatic housing system, vibrating microtomes, microtome-paraffin embedding, Tissue-Tek paraffin embedding machine, Nikon Eclipse i90 imaging system, Neurolucida software, Leica microscope with drawing tube, sharp electrode intracellular electrophysiology rig, signal software, stimulators.
- Links