Dr. De Rosa works at the interface of neuroscience and psychology, studying how well what we know about attention and learning in rats applies to humans.

Dr. De Rosa is originally from Bermuda and moved to the U.S. to attend Vassar College as an undergraduate. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Prior to moving to Cornell in 2013, she was on the faculty at the University of Toronto. She was hired at Cornell as a Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Fellow.

Dr. De Rosa is particularly interested in a chemical in the brain called acetylcholine. This chemical is released in one part of the brain and travels to other parts of the brain where it helps you to focus on a task. The role of acetylcholine in attention seems to be pretty high level because it helps improve performance on both sight- and smell-based tasks.

To test this more conclusively, Dr. De Rosa and colleagues placed rats into a box with 5 openings. Every few seconds, a light would go off outside one of the openings, telling the rat that there was a treat on the other side of that hole. The light would stay on very briefly, so the rats would have to pay attention in order to get to the treat in time. (For smell-based attention tests, they used a puff of citrus smell instead of a light.)

Once the rats were good at the task, they took a toxin that reduces acetylcholine levels and injected it very precisely into the part of the brain that produces acetylcholine. They found that rats who got the injection were slower at both versions of the task when the timing was very quick (requiring high attention level). However, when the light/smell stayed on for a longer time, the two groups of rats performed equally well. This shows that the injection impacted only their attention and not their motivation or coordination.

Dr. De Rosa also compared brain wave patterns from the two groups of rats. She was able to identify a specific pattern of coordination between two parts of the brain that occurred in the un-injected rats while they were waiting for a light or smell stimulus. This pattern was not seen in the injected rats, suggesting that this pattern is important for focus and dependent on acetylcholine.