[R01] Balancing flexibility and stability during learning and task switching
Ente: National Institute of Mental Health
Scadenza: 2031-04-30
Importo max: 656.448 EUR
Paese: US
Descrizione
PROJECT SUMMARY
Adaptive behavior requires cognitive flexibility in an environment that is largely, but not always stable. The
brain must balance flexibility and stability in the routing of sensory and contextual information to guide actions.
Deficits in this balance are hallmarks of disorders ranging from dementia to autism to substance abuse.
Although there are many observations about how neural responses do or do not change in different situations,
how these changes mediate the balance between flexibility and stability in behavior remains poorly understood.
For practical reasons, most studies vary a single or very few aspects of cognitive flexibility. This limited range
makes it difficult to extract general principles linking observed changes in neurons to the balance between
robustness and flexibility in behavior.
Our observations in previous studies of the neural basis of a very simplistic form of cognitive flexibility (how
spatial attention affects visual cortex) led to our central hypothesis: that mappings between stimuli, neurons, and
behavior remain largely stable, but context-dependent modulation of neural activity leads to flexibility in the
information routed through those mappings.
The goal of this proposal is to test the generality of this hypothesis by focusing on less understood brain
areas and several different forms of cognitive flexibility. The innovation that makes it possible to identify general
principles is our behavioral framework in which we can measure and manipulate several forms of cognitive
flexibility within an experimental session. We propose to investigate the neural mechanisms associated with
learning a new set of stimulus-reward associations (Aim 1), characterize neural mechanisms that enable
switching between dramatically different tasks (Aim 2), and use causal manipulations to assess the stability of
interactions between a variety of visual, frontal, parietal, and subcortical areas in different stimulus and task
conditions (Aim 3). We will measure neurons and behavior in animals performing a visual foraging task that
requires flexible associations between a stable set of stimuli and behaviors.
The project will focus largely on parietal area 7a, a hub in the network of areas thought to mediate cognitive
flexibility, and in which responses are much more task-dependent than in visual cortex. The proposed
experiments will investigate the mechanisms underlying learning and task switching by comparing neuronal
responses early and later in each block of trials, in associations that are easy or hard to learn, and in the same
or different stimuli across tasks. Comparisons with visual area V4 (the site of much of our previous work) and a
variety of areas and tasks in Aim 3 will allow us to test the generality of our findings.
Comparing several forms of cognitive flexibility will allow us to identify general principles about how the
nervous system balances stability and flexibility. This knowledge will lay the groun
Istituzione: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
PI: Marlene Rochelle Cohen
Progetto: 1R01MH141757-01
Settori: National Institute of Mental Health
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