Memory networks in the hippocampal formation

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DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from applicant's abstract): A major goal of cognitive neuroscience is to understand behavior and mental processes in terms of the physiological properties of neural circuits. Spatial learning is a prominent paradigm for studying these issues. Place cells of the hippocampus are thought to constitute a cognitive map of the environment. The long-term goal of this research program is to understand how place cells interact with related brain areas to generate spatially specific firing properties and how these properties underlie different forms of learning. The candidate is an Asst. Professor in the Dept. of Neurobiology & Anatomy at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School. This department has a particularly strong focus in the neurobiology of learning and memory. The candidate's current research utilizes powerful multi-electrode techniques to record simultaneously the activity of neuronal ensembles from multiple parts of the hippocampal formation. The hippocampus has been modeled as an associative network with two important properties: pattern completion, the ability to retrieve a stored pattern from degraded input, and pattern separation, the ability to make stored representations of similar inputs more dissimilar. Experimental tests will be made of prior hypotheses that pattern separation occurs in the dentate gyms and pattern completion occurs in the CA3 field. In order to understand the network interactions that generate the neuronal responses in these areas, it will be essential to develop computational models of different neuronal architectures to compare with the recording data and to make predictions for new experiments. A Research Career Award would further the candidate's career development by enabling him to devote time toward learning and applying current modeling techniques toward the experiments in this proposal. The research career development plan entails both course work and hands-on development of models to analyze the data, thus greatly enhancing the overall productivity and significance of the candidate's long-term research-program. These experiments will generate fundamental insights into the neural interactions that underlie learning and memory, as well as insights into how these mechanisms go awry in debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease.