Training in Plasticity, Development, and Cognitive Neuroscience

可塑性、发育和认知神经科学培训

• 批准号: 7892944
• 负责人: ELISSA L NEWPORT
• 金额: $ 14.46万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-07-01 至 2012-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7892944
• 关键词: Development; Training; cognitive neuroscience

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.

描述（由申请人提供）：本提案要求继续支持罗切斯特大学脑与认知科学系的可塑性，发展和认知神经科学培训项目。我们的项目包括11名教师，他们研究人类和动物复杂行为的学习和发展中的神经可塑性。我们是一个不同寻常的团队，因为我们跨越了高度跨学科的范围：我们的教师拥有6个不同领域的学位，并训练我们的学生从行为科学，计算建模和神经科学的联合角度来研究神经可塑性。在过去的10年里，我们一直在训练我们的学生利用这些跨学科的方法来获得关于经验改变思想和大脑的机制的新见解，从语言习得和鸟鸣到视觉感知和运动学习。我们吸引了优秀的学生，并将他们安置在顶尖大学的博士后和教师岗位上。我们在统计学习、贝叶斯感知方法以及学习和发展过程中经验变化的认知和神经机制方面的工作有助于形成对这些问题的新理解。在我们研究和研究生培训的最新阶段，我们开始将我们对神经可塑性的理解与发育和神经疾病的治疗联系起来。我们的教师和学生已经在实验室中使用增强的经验来刺激感知学习，并为未来的一系列患者群体建立了联系，包括皮质视觉障碍患者和手术重新连接的截肢者。这项研究的早期证据表明，对经验通常改变认知和大脑的原理的理解可以有效地用于刺激皮层功能的恢复。我们也在开发记录清醒的神经外科患者大脑的技术，并使用功能性磁共振和光学成像来研究人类和动物的正常发育过程，并将其与自闭症、多动症、异位（发育中皮质层加倍）和其他神经发育障碍的发育过程进行比较。虽然我们的主要研究重点仍然是理解学习和发育可塑性的基本机制，但下一个项目时期的一个重要目标是为我们的学生提供新的机会，发现如何使用这些原理来刺激大脑从损伤和疾病中修复和恢复。