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My lab:
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There's a great new article out in the journal Learning & Memory. It reviews the recent developments in the field of conditioning the feeding behavior of the sea slug Aplysia. You can see an example of what this behavior looks like on YouTube.
"Why the hell would you study learning in a snail?", you may ask. There are a couple of pretty good reasons for that. For one, their brain is simple and consists of great, big, identifiable brain-cells (neurons), which make it easy to experiment with them. They can be trained (with a food reward) to increase their biting behavior both to a cue and spontaneously. It is known which brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) mediate the food reward (dopamine). The neural network controlling the behavior is very well characterized. At the moment, I think this marine snail really is one of the greatest model systems to study associative learning and especially operant conditioning vs. classical conditioning.
The authors (Drs. Douglas Baxter and John Byrne, both colleagues and good friends of mine) describe the learning experiments and the neurobiological mechanisms that were found. They show how a single identified neuron changes differentially depending on the way the animal is conditioned. It becomes clear, that operant and classical learning have many commonalities, but differ in some crucial aspects.
So if you always wanted to know more about the neurobiological principles by which brains learn to predict the future, head on over there and indulge yourselves!
Posted on Friday 01 December 2006 - 19:17:12 comment: 0
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