James McGaugh

James L. McGaugh (born December 17, 1931) is an American neurobiologist working in the field of learning and memory. He is currently a Research Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

McGaugh received his B.A. from San Jose State University in 1953 and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. He was briefly a professor at San Jose State and then did postdoctoral work in neuropharmacology with Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Bovet at the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá in Rome, Italy. He then became a professor at the University of Oregon from 1961 to 1964. He was recruited to the University of California, Irvine, in 1964 (the year of the school's founding) to be the founding chair of the Department of Psychobiology (now Neurobiology and Behavior). He became dean (1967–1970) of the School of Biological Sciences and Vice Chancellor (1975–1977) and executive Vice Chancellor (1978–1982) of the university. In 1982, he founded the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and remained director from 1982 to 2004.

McGaugh's early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) demonstrated that memories are not instantly created in a long-term, permanent fashion. Rather, immediately after a learning event, the memory is labile and susceptible to influence. As time passes, the memory becomes increasingly resistant to external influences and eventually becomes stored in a relatively permanent manner, a process termed memory consolidation. McGaugh found that drugs, given to an animal shortly after a learning event, influence the subsequent retention of that event. The concept of such "post-training" manipulations is one of McGaugh's greatest contributions to the field of learning and memory because it avoids many potential confounds, such as performance effects of the drug, that may occur when a drug or other treatment is given prior to the training.

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