Project description DEENESFRITPL The mechanisms of post-reminder amnesia Preventing the expression of selected emotional memories can be beneficial in treating patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and addiction. This prevention is possible if pharmacological or behavioural interventions are administered when the memory is retrieved. Such treatment can continually block the memory from surfacing, but it is not understood whether the memory has effectively been erased. Funded by the European Research Council, the WipeOutFear project will conduct experiments to uncover the underlying mechanisms of post-reminder amnesia and explore whether it can be reversed. The project also plans to develop new techniques to block the expression of emotional memories by determining favourable conditions. Show the project objective Hide the project objective Objective Can fear memories be erased from the brain? While it sounds like science fiction, recent findings suggest that fear memories can be undone upon their retrieval, through either pharmacological or behavioural interventions. Still, whether such reconsolidation interference techniques genuinely result in permanent erasure of the original fear memory is a topic of considerable controversy. Purely behavioural work may never settle the debate, as it cannot be excluded that an apparent loss of fear memory reflects a long-lasting failure to retrieve the fear memory rather than its permanent erasure. We argue that a careful look at the brain memory circuits that control the reduced expression of fear after reconsolidation interference, through imaging studies in humans and inactivation studies in rats, does have the potential to resolve the controversy and decide between erasure and retrieval failure as mechanisms underlying reconsolidation interference [WP1]. To open up a memory trace for reconsolidation interference, it is important that retrieval of the memory is accompanied by surprise or prediction error (PE; a discrepancy between the memory and what actually happens), as we demonstrated in a break-through study in Science (Sevenster, Beckers, & Kindt, 2013). Here, we propose that subtle differences in the degree of PE generated during fear memory retrieval may be what demarcates memory erasure from impaired retrieval. To investigate that claim, we will pioneer an objective neural marker of PE in humans [WP2] and use optogenetics to directly trigger dopamine-based PE signals in the rat brain in order to establish the causal role of PE in enabling fear memory erasure. Along the way, we will investigate the generalization of fear to novel cues as both a problem and a potential target for fear memory modification [WP3] and test an innovative method to interfere with reconsolidation that circumvents limitations of current pharmacological and behavioural techniques [WP4]. Fields of science social sciencespsychologycognitive psychologymental processesnatural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologycognitive neuroscience Programme(s) H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme Topic(s) ERC-CoG-2014 - ERC Consolidator Grant Call for proposal ERC-2014-CoG See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant Coordinator KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN Net EU contribution € 2 000 000,00 Address Oude markt 13 3000 Leuven Belgium See on map Region Vlaams Gewest Prov. Vlaams-Brabant Arr. Leuven Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00 Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by Net EU contribution Expand all Collapse all KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN Belgium Net EU contribution € 2 000 000,00 Address Oude markt 13 3000 Leuven See on map Region Vlaams Gewest Prov. Vlaams-Brabant Arr. Leuven Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Other funding € 0,00
