Cognition and Memory

Research on Cognition and Memory in NBB aims to understand how brain activity gives raise to cognitive functions such as learning, memory, spatial navigation and decision making. Researchers focus on investigating how the coordinated activity of neurons distributed across brain areas enables animals to perform a remarkable array of flexible, intelligent behaviors. To tackle these challenging questions, they combine tools and approaches from different disciplines, ranging from molecular approaches to label and manipulate specific cell types, cutting-edge electrophysiological and imaging methods to track the activity of hundreds of neurons in behaving animals to computational analysis of large neural and behavioral datasets. This research is advancing our understanding of some of the most intriguing scientific questions, such as our remarkable ability to remember experiences for a life time or to rapidly make decisions under uncertainty, and also how these processes go awry in brain diseases.