Roland Pusch explains how the brain overwrites old memories with new ones
On June 26th, Collaborative Research Centre 874 hosted the last BRAIN CAFÉ before the summer break. The lecture series, which highlights neuroscientific research for non-scientists, focussed on the relearning of memories. The talk of Roland Pusch, Project Manager A01, is entitled: “How Pigeons help us to understand a complex learning behaviour: Extinction learning”.
We can easily put new information into our memories – and we can learn that past learning content is no longer valid. Once acquired contents are not forgotten, but temporarily overridden by a new learning process. In his talk, Roland Pusch introduced this learning concept and used selected experiments from the Department of Biopsychology to explain how we explore the complex processes of extinction learning – with the help of domestic pigeons.
The BRAIN CAFÉ talks are hosted by Collaborative Research Centre 874 “Integration and Representation of Sensory Processes”. The interdisciplinary research consortium has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft since 2010 to investigate how sensory information is processed in the brain.