2024 Seed Grant
Steffen B.E. Wolff, Ph.D.
University of Maryland, Baltimore
Our ability to learn is remarkable: not only can we learn everything from facts over directions to motor skills, but we also continuously form new memories without forgetting what we learned before. However, we know from experience that memories are not independent – learning related languages or sports like tennis and table tennis may help to learn each one faster, but we may also get confused or ‘stuck’ in one of them. Surprisingly, such interactions also occur between seemingly unrelated learning processes relying on distinct systems in the brain: memorizing a poem may either boost or hamper improving our tennis serve – depending on whether we learn it before or after tennis practice. Furthermore, neuropsychiatric disorders that affect cognitive control, like major depressive disorders or even stress can disrupt learning and memory broadly, without directly affecting individual learning systems. Taken together, this suggests that the brain tightly coordinates learning processes, even if they engage different learning systems, likely to both prevent interference and take advantage of similarities to boost learning. In this project we will train rats on motor skills and navigation tasks to study when and how they influence each other. We will use cutting-edge neuroscience techniques to determine the role of a potential learning coordination center, the prefrontal cortex, and what happens in the motor circuits when learning interactions occur. These experiments will systematically test learning interactions and the underlying neuronal circuitry and reveal previously largely neglected fundamental aspects of learning and memory in general.
