This project will focus on the neurophysiological basis of extinction learning, particularly at the (sub)cellular levels of encoding and processing within neuronal populations. We will use electrophysiological approaches to examine the neural mechanisms and signatures of task acquisition, extinction learning and renewal in the rodent brain. Focus will be placed on the hippocampus, but its interactions with structures such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) will also be studied.

Guiding questions of A04:

• How do neuronal oscillations change during task acquisition, effective context-dependent extinction learning and renewal of an appetitive spatial task in rodents? (Neural signatures)
• How do place fields change when effective context-dependent extinction learning takes place? Does re-activation restore the original place field patterns? (Neural codes)
• Do extinction-related brain structures (hippocampus, PFC) engage in ‘dialog’ at the level of neuronal oscillations during extinction? (Neural dialog)
• To what extent do neuromodulatory structures and plasticity-related proteins contribute to the abovementioned processes? (Neural modulators)