Place and Response Mechanisms in Human Spatial Learning

人类利用空间记忆在日常生活中成功地在熟悉的环境中导航，比如找到车钥匙或去办公室。然而，也许每个人在一生中的某个时刻都有在错误的目的地结束的经历。当这种情况发生时，我们的记忆系统出了什么问题？过去，我们对记忆导航的理解依赖于对动物的研究。例如，研究表明，两种不同的学习策略可以解释记忆导航的灵活性和习惯性：大脑海马体中快速、灵活的位置学习，但纹状体中缓慢、僵化的特定反应模式学习。目前还不清楚这种动物种群的研究结果如何应用于人类的空间记忆。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，研究者将使用行为和脑成像技术（如功能磁共振成像）来研究地点学习和反应学习，并在动物空间学习和人类空间认知领域建立桥梁。该项目的目标是测试人类是否以及如何参与位置和反应学习机制，将这些机制与预测的神经关联联系起来，并确定它们的功能意义。研究者设计了一系列的行为和神经科学实验来实现这些目标。这项工作代表了人类学习和记忆研究的一个变革的步骤。通过建立心理学、神经生物学和遗传学之间的联系，将非人类动物的发现与人类行为和大脑机制的研究联系起来，有可能显著推进我们对人类空间认知的理解。这项工作还通过考虑人类如何以及在什么条件下学习不同，为人类记忆和学习风格的个体差异等更广泛的问题提供了一个重要的桥梁。这些结果可能导致更好的战略，以加强教学和学习在广泛的应用。这笔拨款将通过提供本科生、研究生和博士后水平的培训机会，并通过向公众提供相关材料和演示，随时支持教育推广。

Humans use spatial memory to successfully navigate in familiar environments on a daily basis, such as finding car keys or getting to the office. However, perhaps everyone has the experience of ending up at the wrong destination at some point in their lifetime. What has gone wrong in our memory system when this happens? Our understanding of navigation from memory in the past has relied on research with animals. For example, research has shown two distinct learning strategies that may explain both the flexible and habitual nature of navigation from memory: fast, flexible place learning in the hippocampus of the brain, but slow, rigid learning of specific patterns of response in the striatum. How such research findings from the animal population can apply to human spatial memory is so far unclear. With support from the National Science Foundation, the investigator will use behavioral and brain imaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging) to study place learning and response learning and to bridge the domains of animal spatial learning and human spatial cognition. The goals of the project are to test whether and how humans engage place and response learning mechanisms, link those mechanisms to predicted neural correlates, and establish their functional significance. The investigator has designed a series of behavioral and neuroscience experiments to achieve these goals. This work represents a transformative step in the study of human learning and memory. Linking findings from non-human animals to studies of human behavior and brain mechanisms has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of human spatial cogntion by building connections among psychology, neurobiology, and genetics. The work also provides an essential bridge to broader issues of human memory and individual differences in learning styles by considering how and under what conditions humans might learn differently. Such results could lead to better strategies for enhancing teaching and learning in a wide range of applications. This grant will readily support educational outreach by providing training opportunities at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels, and by making relevant materials and demos accessible to the public.