A Wellcome Discovery Award has been made to a team of researchers led by Professor Rafal Bogacz in the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit, which also includes DPAG’s Professor Andrew King, Professor Colin Akerman in the Department of Pharmacology and Professor Claudia Clopath at Imperial College London. This award will combine computational and experimental methods to investigate mechanisms of learning in cortical neurons and networks. Specifically, the team will test a radical new idea about how error-based learning happens in the brain, namely that this is driven by plasticity arising from differences in activity between the dendrites and cell bodies of individual neurons. This research aims to identify fundamental rules of plasticity that can be formalised mathematically and tested experimentally. It will involve close integration of computational modelling by Rafal Bogacz and Claudia Clopath with investigation of cellular plasticity mechanisms in vitro in Colin Akerman’s lab and of auditory learning in vivo in Andrew King’s lab.
Andrew King comments, 'I’m very excited about this project, which has integrative neuroscience at its core. We believe that our combination of theoretical and experimental approaches spanning different levels of analysis, from neurons to networks, has the potential to transform our understanding of learning mechanisms in cortical neurons.'
