Inhibition and Extinction in Associative Learning

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The project studies how animals learn about statistical relationships between events (for example, between a visual cue and food). Such learning is highly adaptive, but can contribute to maladaptive behaviours like phobias, addictions, and over-eating. A detailed understanding of learning mechanisms is crucial if we are to develop interventions to control these behaviours. In keeping with that goal, this project focuses on learning about negative correlations, as when a cue signals that food will not occur (inhibitory learning) and when a cue that once signalled food now does not (extinction learning). It uses recently developed tools for uncovering the content of learning, and combines experimental and computational analysis of learning algorithms.