CAREER: Impact of stress coping style on cognitive processes and the underlying neuromolecular mechanisms

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Continued survival often depends upon the ability of organisms to learn from previous social and environmental challenges. Personality type, learning environment, stress, and genetics are some of the variables that can influence cognitive capabilities (e.g. learning and memory). How these factors interact to contribute to differences in learning and memory between individuals, is poorly understood. Personality type can consistently bias cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses to disparate challenges. Organisms with proactive (i.e. “bold”) personality type, are more likely more risk-prone, routine oriented, and show a low stress response. In contrast, reactive (i.e. “shy”) animals, are more risk-averse, sensitive to environmental change, and have a higher stress response. This project will examine how an personality type constrains learning and memory capabilities and elucidate the underlying neurobiological and genetic mechanisms. Investigation of how learning context, brain dynamics, and genetics modulate learning and memory, will provides targets for understanding what could drive biased cognitive responses and serve as important factors in constraining behavioral variation. This project will also opportunities for University of Nebraska at Omaha and K-12 students of the Omaha Public Schools district to perform behavioral neurogenetics experiments and enhance scientific literacy and comprehension.Exposure to stress often results in learning, and the memory of past experience can inform future behavioral response. Differences in learning and memory performance are attributable, in part, to environmental conditions (e.g. context, reinforcement type) and personality type. Key differences in synaptic plasticity and neurotransmission that distinguish alternative personality types (e.g. proactive and reactive stress coping styles) may also inform differences in learning and memory. Variations in learning and memory performance may be driven by specific neural activity patterns across brain regions. Activity of and in neural network in turn, may be arranged and influenced by the expression of genes related to synaptic plasticity. The experiments will identify how context and reinforcement type interact with personality type to produce variation in associative and spatial learning and memory performance. Further, these studies will elucidate how neural and gene transcriptional activities can account for variation in learning and memory between and within reinforcement types. Specifically, the necessity of candidate genes in learning will be assessed via the manipulation of gene expression. The experiments in this project will lead to advancements in understanding how (1) learning environment and personality type (i.e stress coping style) intersect and (2) gene expression and neural activity integrate to mediate variation of learning and memory that may explain constraints on behavioral plasticity. It will also set a foundation for comparative approaches to assess if the identified neuromolecular mechanisms similarly explain behavioral variation in other taxa.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.