RESEARCH TRAINING IN LEARNING, DEVELOPMENT, AND BIOLOGY

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This proposal requests a new training grant to support a predoctoral and postdoctoral training program in Learning, Development, and Biology, housed within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. The training program includes nine faculty members from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, all of whom study learning and development of complex behaviors in humans and animals. This program reflects our recognition of the potential for a synthetic approach to the study of learning: current approaches to computational modeling, neurophysiological, and behavioral investigations have begun to share enough formal similarities to be mutually informative; at the same time, they bring distinctive perspectives to the problem of learning and development, so that their integration can lead to new insights. Our program therefore aims to train students in the study of learning and developmental plasticity from the joint perspectives of behavioral, computational, and neurophysiological approaches. Surrounding our group at the University are additional programs in the mature functioning of each of the relevant domains and systems. We request support for 2 predoctoral students and 2 postdoctoral students per year; when combined with other sources of support, this will permit a larger group of approximately 5-7 predoctoral students in this program, as well as predoctoral and postdoctoral students in other related programs. Trainees will enter through the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and will be trained in core courses and advanced seminars in Learning, Development & Biology, Language & Cognition, Perception, and Basic Neuroscience, and in research methods, courses, and research experience in behavioral studies, computational modeling, and neuroscience studies. This breadth of training is made possible by the fact that our program faculty have degrees in 5 different disciplines and ourselves conduct research on overlapping problems from a variety of different methodological approaches. We currently advise 10 predoctoral students with a focus on learning and developmental plasticity, who exemplify the high quality of students we are able to attract.