Department of Experimental Psychology

Professor T. W. Robbins, FRS Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, E-mail: t.robbins@psychol.cam.ac.uk T W Robbins Brief Biography: Trevor Robbins was appointed in 1997 as the Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He was elected to the Chair of Expt. Psychology (and Head of Department) at Cambridge from October 2002. He is also Director of the newly-established Cambridge MRC Centre in Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience, the main objective of which is to inter-relate basic and clinical research in Psychiatry and Neurology for such conditions as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases, frontal lobe injury, schizophrenia, depression, drug addiction and developmental syndromes such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He has been President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society (1992-1994) and he won that Society’s inaugural Distinguished Scientist Award in 2001. He was also President of the British Association of Psychopharmacology from 1996 to 1997. He has edited the journal Psychopharmacology since 1980 and joined the editorial board of Science in Jan. 2003. He has been a member of the Medical Research Council (UK) and chaired the Neuroscience and Mental Health Board from 1995 until 1999. He has been included on a list of the 100 most cited neuroscientists by ISI. He has published nearly five hundred full papers in scientific journals and has co-edited three books (Psychology for Medicine: The Prefrontal Cortex; Executive and Cognitive Function, and Disorders of Brain and Mind).

Research interests: Functions of prefrontal-striatal systems, psychopharmacology of cognition and reinforcement.

My research interests span the areas of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology. My main work focuses on the functions of the frontal lobes of the brain and their connections with other regions, including the so-called brain reward systems which have been discovered in other animals. These brain systems are relevant to such psychiatric and neurological disorders as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, dementia, schizophrenia, depression, drug addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as frontal lobe injury. A variety of methods is used for studying these systems, including sophisticated psychological paradigms for investigating cognitive functions such as planning, decision-making and self-control (impulsivity) in both normal subjects and patients; these include the computerised CANTAB battery, which I co-invented. I also employ functional brain imaging using brain scanners that operate via magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography (PET) to determine where in the human brain various cognitive operations are carried out. In addition, I am interested in establishing how drugs work to produce changes in brain chemistry, and how these affect behaviour. Two particular current interests are characterising beneficial effects of drugs on cognition, as may occur with ‘cognitive enhancing’ drugs used clinically and deleterious effects of drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and amphetamine, which may lead to possible long-term intellectual impairment.

Some recent publications:

1. Chamberlain S, Muller U, Blackwell A, Clark L, Robbins TW, Sahakian BJ (2006) Neurochemical modulation of response inhibition and probabilistic learning in humans. Science 311, 861-863.
2. Everitt BJ, Robbins TW (2005) Neural systems of reinforcement for drug addiction: from actions to habits to compulsion. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1481-1489.
3. Ron M, Robbins TW (Eds.) (2003). Disorders of Mind and Brain 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cools R, Robbins TW (2004). Chemistry of the adaptive mind. Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences.15, 2871-2888.
4. Aron, AR, Fletcher PC, Bullmore ET, Sahakian BJ and Robbins TW (2003) Stop-signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans, Nature Neuroscience, 6, 115-116.
5. Turner DC, Robbins TW, Clark L, Aron AR, Dowson J, Sahakian BJ (2003).Cognitive enhancing effects of modafinil in healthy volunteers, Psychopharmacology 165, 260-269.
6. Manes F, Sahakian BJ, Clark L, Rogers R, Antoun N, Aitken M, Robbins TW (2002) Decision-making processes following damage to the prefrontal cortex. Brain 125, 624-639.
7. Cardinal, R.N., Pennicott, C., Sugathapala, C.L., Robbins, T.W. and Everitt, B.J. (2001) Impulsive choice induced in rats by lesions of the nucleus accumbens core. Science, 292, 2499-2501.
8. Cools R, Barker R, Sahakian BJ, Robbins TW (2001) Enhanced or impaired cognitive function in Parkinson’s disease as a function of dopaminergic medication and task demands. Cerebral Cortex, 11, 1136-1143.

© Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge