Training in Plasticity, Development, and Cognitive Neuroscience

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal requests continuing support for a training program in Plasticity, Development, and Cognitive Neuroscience, housed in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. Our program includes eleven faculty members who study neural plasticity in the learning and development of complex behaviors in humans and animals. We are an unusual group in that we span a highly interdisciplinary range: our faculty have degrees in 6 different fields and train our students to approach neural plasticity from the joint perspectives of behavioral science, computational modeling, and neuroscience. We have spent the last 10 years training our students to utilize these interdisciplinary methods to achieve novel insights into the mechanisms by which experience alters the mind and brain, in systems ranging from language acquisition and bird song to visual perception and motor learning. We have attracted outstanding students and have placed them in postdoctoral and faculty positions at top universities. Our work on statistical learning, Bayesian approaches to perception, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying experiential change during learning and development has helped to shape a new understanding of these problems. In the newest phase of our research and graduate training, we are beginning to link our understanding of neural plasticity to the treatment of developmental and neurological disorders. Our faculty and students already use enhanced experiences in the lab to stimulate perceptual learning and have established links for future work with a range of patient populations, including patients with cortical visual impairments and amputees with surgically re-attached hands. The early evidence from this research suggests that an understanding of the principles by which experience normally alters cognition and the brain can be effectively used to provoke recovery of function in the cortex. We are also developing techniques for recording from the brains of awake neurosurgical patients and for using functional magnetic resonance and optical imaging to study the normal course of development in humans and animals as compared with the course of development in disorders such as autism, ADHD, heterotopia (where there is a developmental doubling of cortical layers), and other neurodevelopmental disorders. While our primary research focus continues to be on understanding the basic mechanisms underlying learning and developmental plasticity, an important goal of the next project period is to provide our students with new opportunities to discover how these principles can be used to stimulate the brain to repair and recover from damage and disease.