FOR 1581:  Extinction Learning: Behavioural, Neural and Clinical Mechanisms

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities ; Medicine
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 179167628

We can learn new information and are subsequently able to remember it. However, we are equally able to learn that once acquired information is no longer valid and cease to respond to it. While the initial process of acquisition of new knowledge is well studied, the process of extinction is far less understood. Extinction is known to involve a new learning process that is different and more complex than the initial acquisition of the CS-US-association. Extinguished responses do not disappear but can return following manipulations such as a change in context as in renewal paradigms.
Within the scope of our Research Unit, we plan to explore the neural, the behavioural and the clinical mechanisms of extinction in various species, including humans. The diversity of our approaches at the systems and at the technical level will be combined with a high level of uniformity at conceptual, experimental, structural and technical levels: At the experimental design level, all participants within the Research Unit will utilise the renewal approach in their experiments. This will enable us to study the role of contextual cues and to analyse the common signatures of extinction learning from rodents to men with a single procedure. At the structural level, all neurobiological and most clinical groups will concentrate in at least a part of their experiments on the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala, since previous studies had identified these areas to be critical for extinction learning.
All studies with human subjects will employ comparable predictive learning tasks in at least a part of their experiments. At the neurochemical level, we plan to study overlapping transmitter- und receptor-systems during extinction learning in several projects. Using this strategy, we intend to harvest deep insights into both the common and the distinct mechanisms of extinction learning in different systems and organisms. We believe that such an approach is the most promising one to achieve translational insights between basic and clinical science.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Combining cells and behavior: Neuronal foundations of extinction and renewal (Applicant Güntürkün, Onur )
• Constribution of the human cerebellum to extinction learning and renewal (Applicant Timmann-Braun, Dagmar )
• Effects of pharmacological modulation on human learning and brain activation patterns in extinction and the renewal effect. (Applicant Lissek, Silke )
• Effects of the stress hormone cortisol on extinction retrieval: In search of the neural correlates (Applicant Wolf, Oliver Tobias )
• Exposure therapy outcome in specific phobia: the significance of extinction learning and stress system activity (Applicant Zlomuzica, Armin )
• Extinction and renewal in behaviorally conditioned immunosuppression (Applicant Schedlowski, Manfred )
• Koordinationsprojekt (Applicant Güntürkün, Onur )
• Neural mechanisms of learning and extinction in human visceral pain (Applicant Elsenbruch, Sigrid )
• The Role and Mechanisms of Synaptic Plasticitiy in Extinction Learning (Applicant Manahan-Vaughan, Denise )
• The Role of Attention in Renewal (Applicant Lachnit, Harald )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Onur Güntürkün