The capacity to learn from experience is an essential brain function, which drastically increases an animal’s fitness by enabling rapid, adaptive changes of behavior. Learning to associate a set of stimuli is a simple and fundamental form of memory formation, which has been under intense investigation from various angles for many decades. Associative learning allows organisms to confer significance to novel stimuli predicting aversive or appetitive experiences and to adopt appropriate actions according to the valence of expected outcomes. Understanding how activity in defined neuronal circuits mediates appetitive and aversive learning, as well as how these circuitries might be shared or different, is a central, unanswered question in systems neuroscience.
Our project addresses the fundamental question how the brain encodes and controls behavior. While we have a reasonable understanding of the role of entire brain areas in such processes, and of mechanisms at the molecular and synaptic levels, there is a big gap in our knowledge of how behavior is controlled at the level of defined neuronal circuits.
Experience-dependent changes in behavior are mediated by long-term functional modifications in brain circuits. To investigate the neurobiological basis of learning and memory, we are focusing on how changes in the structure and function of neuronal circuits relates to and drives learning at the behavioral level. In order to investigate the underlying mechanisms in great cellular details, we are using simple learning paradigms including classical (Pavlovian) conditioning and instrumental, goal-directed forms of learning. A large number of studies in animals and humans have identified the amygdala as a key structure embedded in a brain-wide neuronal network mediating multiple forms of associative and instrumental learning. Using a multidisciplinary approach in mice, we investigate the anatomical and functional logic of amygdala circuits, their computations, and their interactions with other brain areas.
Our research shows that functionally, anatomically and genetically defined types of amygdala neurons are precisely connected both within local and within larger-scale neuronal networks, and that they selectively contribute to specific aspects of associative learning about both positive and negative experiences. Using deep brain Ca2+ imaging in freely behaving mice, we have described, for the first time, the rules governing neuronal ensemble dynamics in amygdala circuits during associative learning and during explorative behavior. The results of our investigations bring us a step closer to understanding how the brain implements learning algorithms for complex computations at the level of defined neuronal circuits.
Importantly, the investigation of the neurobiological basis of learning is also key for obtaining a mechanistic understanding and developing new therapeutic strategies for debilitating brain diseases including severe psychiatric and neurological conditions. Mood and anxiety disorders, for instance, are among the greatest societal burdens in terms of impairment and disability. These diseases thus represent one of the greatest preventive and therapeutic challenges in medicine. To meet these challenges, there is an urgent need for a better understanding of the underlying neurobiology. However, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the ethiology and pathophysiology of such mental disorders is poorly understood. One of the emerging concepts posits that maladaptive neuronal plasticity caused by environmental and genetic factors can give rise to pathological neuronal circuit function, and that this process is key for the progression and manifestation of mental diseases.
