My research is primarily focused on memory and decision-making and my doctoral dissertation was centered on human time perception. Time is highly abstract in that we cannot see it, hear it, touch it, or sense it directly, yet time representation plays a large role in several of our cognitive processes. My research demonstrates that internal representations of time guide our decisions, where we tend to behave more impatiently when events in the future feel further away. On a neural level, I show that the hippocampus is important for tracking different distances in time, a region of the brain located in the medial temporal lobe. This work, in combination with that of others, provides important insight into the neural basis of time representation. It paves the way for future work to explore whether altered representations of time underlie the maladaptive planning and decision-making observed in psychiatric disorders. If so, re-adjusting individuals’ representations of time may offer therapeutic potential.
Publications
- Croote, D.E., Lerman, L., Baxter, M.G., *Montagrin, A., *Schiller, D. A hippocampal timestamp for goals. In preparation.
- Croote, D.E., Lai, B., Hu, J., Baxter, M.G., *Montagrin, A., *Schiller, D. (2020). Delay discounting decisions are linked to temporal distance representations of world events across cultures. Scientific Reports, 10, 12913.
- Mul, J.D., Soto, M., Cahill, M.E., Ryan, R.E., Takahashi, H., So, K., Zheng, J., Croote, D.E., Hirshman, M.F., le Fleur, S.E., Nestler, E.J., Goodyear, L.J. Voluntary wheel running promotes resilience to chronic social defeat stress in mice: a role for nucleus accumbens ΔFosB. Neuropsychopharmacology. 43, 1934-1942 (2018).
- Juarez, B., Morel, C., Ku, S.M., Liu, Y., Zhang, H., Montgomery, S., Gregoire, H., Ribeiro, E., Crumiller, M., Roman-Ortiz, C., Walsh, J.J., Jackson, K., Croote, D.E., Zu, Y., Zhang, S., Vendruscolo, E.F., Edwards, S., Roberts, A., Hodes, G., Lu, Y., Calipari, E.S., Chaudhury, D., Friedman, A.K., Han, M.H. Midbrain circuit regulation of individual alcohol drinking behaviors. Nature Communications. 8, 2220 (2017).
Awards
- 2018 - 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow
- 2016 - 2018 Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award
- 2016 Undergraduate Awards Highly Commended
- 2015 Karen T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award