Norman Lab
Principal Investigator: Kenneth A Norman
Institution: Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
Primary Subfield: Computational Biology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
The overarching goal of this renewal application is to understand how stored memories change as a function of experience, and how these changes support our ability to discriminate similar stimuli. The inability to make such distinctions can lead to mundane errors and memory interference, but also devastating cognitive, semantic, communication, and developmental deficits. We focus on the challenging scenario when the differences between stimuli are subtle and the stimuli appear at different times, requiring memory. The specific goal of this proposal is to understand the interacting roles of the hippocampus and cortex in this scenario. Recent studies have found that the key to behavioral discrimination is differentiation of hippocampal representations — a phenomenon whereby the representations of similar stimuli are pushed apart beyond the orthogonality of pattern separation, to the point of anti-correlation. Crucially, existing computational models of the hippocampus do not exhibit differ- entiation and thus cannot provide a satisfactory account of memory-based discrimination learning. The major significance of this proposal is to remedy this critical gap, by formulating and testing…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01MH069456-17: Computational, Neural, and Behavioral Studies of Competition-Dependent Learning (2026)
- 5P50MH136296-03: Project 3: Latent-cause inference in anxiety (2026)
- 2R01MH069456-16A1: Computational, Neural, and Behavioral Studies of Competition-Dependent Learning (2025)
- 5P50MH136296-02: Project 3: Latent-cause inference in anxiety (2025)
- 1P50MH136296-01: Project 3: Latent-cause inference in anxiety (2024)
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