Project Reference: TRG27-PSY-LC1

Project title: Translational assessment of learning and memory in development: Triangulating across AI, Animals and humans.

Project outline

Learning and memory are crucial skills in both mature and developing organisms. Disruption of these processes are implicated in almost all psychiatric, neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders. As such they are both an important target for understanding in themselves, but are also indicators of current and later vulnerability for disorders, deficits and other risks to lifelong health and wellbeing. A key issue facing current research, intervention and treatment is that while translational models (both animal and computational) have the potential to be tremendously useful in helping us understand human development, the methods of assessments for learning and memory in rodent models, computational models and humans are very different, particularly when considering developmental research. This project will seek to work across computational, animal and human labs to develop comparable and complementary assessments for learning and memory not by enforcing something designed for one population onto the others, but finding the ecological validity “common ground”. 

The focus of this studentship will be the development of interdisciplinary methods, with an emphasis on creating a common frame of reference for researchers with different study models. During the first year the student will gain, through rotations, experience in bio-inspired computational modelling (Astle lab), rodent models (Deardon lab) and young children (Cheke lab). During this year they will also complete a literature review on behavioural evaluations of learning and memory in these three fields.  Hands on experience of these different models/populations while also learning about the existing evaluations that exist within the field will establish the student with a strong foundation from which to begin to develop their own, translational assessments from the second year. Using AnimalAI to simulate physical tasks for computational models, the student will design and pilot task(s) with all three models.

Principal Supervisor

Professor Lucy Cheke

Email address: lgc23@cam.ac.uk

Department / Partner Institute: Psychology

Website: https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/lucy-cheke

BBSRC strategic theme

Bioscience for an integrated understanding of health