Neural mechanisms of extinction learning

• Applicant: Dr. Johannes Felsenberg
• Subject Area: Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277848606

Retrieving a memory makes it malleable and entails its re-evaluation. This property of memory has been considered as a strategy to target maladaptive memories in humans, by either producing a memory of opposing valence (extinction learning) or by disruption of the initial memory (interference with reconsolidation). Even though the underlying neuronal processes are of high interest, they are poorly understood. The principles of extinction learning and reconsolidation are conserved throughout animal kingdom. The relatively simple central nervous system and the sophisticated genetic toolbox of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster make it an ideal system to investigate neural circuit mechanisms of memory re-evaluation. Fruit flies can learn to associate odours with reward or punishment and they retain memories of these associations for several days. Anatomically distinct dopaminergic neurons that project to different zones of the fly mushroom body assign either positive or negative value to odours during learning. The proposed work aims to explain how retrieving specific aspects of reward memory re-engages these dopaminergic reinforcement pathways leading to mechanistically different forms of memory re-evaluation; either memory extinction or reconsolidation. I will combine genetic manipulations with behavioural and physiological Ca2+-imaging experiments to understand how synapses in the underlying mushroom body network are altered during memory re-evaluation.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Dr. Scott Waddell