Joseph Martis

Attention is a critical cognitive mechanism that scaffolds learning, supports personality development, and guides interaction with the environment. Yet, it is vulnerable to implicit influences and self-limiting characteristics. Attentional differences, for example, have been linked to symptoms of depression and anxiety. While psychedelic research has shown therapeutic potential for these conditions, little work has examined the cognitive mechanisms involved. The present study investigates the effect of psilocybin—a compound in phase 3 clinical trials for depression—on attention using a classical cue competition paradigm in mice. Overshadowing occurs when a more salient cue captures attention, enabling learning of its association with an outcome while preventing learning about an equally predictive but less salient cue. Mice were assigned to one of four groups differing by condition (overshadowing vs. control) and drug (saline vs. psilocybin). Across 12 days of conditioning, the overshadowing groups received paired presentations of a light and tone predicting a sucrose pellet, whereas control groups received only the light cue. Because mice have superior auditory over visual processing, the light cue is typically overshadowed. Following conditioning, two reinstatement sessions were conducted where only a single cue was presented per day, beginning with the light. We hypothesized greater conditioned responding to the light cue in psilocybin-treated mice compared to saline in the overshadowing condition. Results are consistent with this prediction, mice which received psilocybin displayed disrupted overshadowing behaviors. Results suggest psilocybin may reduce cue competition effects and promote broader attentional allocation in mice. Current analyses are investigating differences in c-Fos activation following presentation of the light cue prior to perfusion, with the goal of identifying neural differences in cue processing between mice that exhibited overshadowing and those that did not.

Joseph Martis is a Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University whose work spans psychology, neuroscience, and biomedical sciences. His research explores how categorization, associative learning, and attention shape human and animal behavior, and how these mechanisms contribute to learning traps and cognitive inflexibility. Using behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modeling approaches, his work aims to better understand the cognitive and neural processes underlying decision-making and adaptive behavior across both human and translational animal models. He is particularly interested in translating basic cognitive principles into applied settings, including clinical neuroscience, human-technology interaction, and psychiatric research. He has held research roles across multiple institutions, including the Caprock fMRI Lab at Texas Tech University, the NeuRO Lab at The Ohio State University, and the Translational Medicine Institute at Colorado State University. His collaborative work spans cognitive psychology, occupational therapy, rehabilitation science, and translational neuroscience, contributing to publications on altered states of consciousness, autism interventions, motor-cognitive rehabilitation, and learning processes. Beyond research, Joseph is deeply committed to mentorship and teaching. He has served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for graduate-level research methods and cognitive neuroscience courses and has mentored undergraduate researchers presenting projects on learning, motivation, and automation at university research conferences. His work has been presented at conferences including the Psychonomic Society annual meeting, Society for Neuroscience, and Psychedelic Science Convention. He has received multiple honors for research and academic achievement, including Colorado State University Psychology Department Success Grants, a Psychedelic Science Convention Scholarship, and research travel awards.