DFG Research Unit 1581
About the DFG Research Unit 1581
The scope of our Research Unit lies on the neural, the behavioral, and the clinical mechanisms of extinction in various species, including humans.
Our understanding of the behavioral and the neural basis of context-dependency of extinction learning is rudimentary. Therefore, analyses of extinction learning require a group effort with specialists from different fields. This is why we came together. To succeed as a group, we have to maximize the overlap of our approaches by concomitantly diversifying the methods and systems that we study.
The diversity of our approaches at the systems and at the technical level is combined with a high level of uniformity at conceptual, experimental, structural, and technical levels:
- At the experimental design level, all participants within the Research Unit will utilize the renewal approach in their experiments. This will enable us to study the role of contextual cues and to analyze the common signatures of extinction learning from rodents to men with a single procedure.
- At the structural level, all neurobiological and most clinical groups will concentrate in at least a part of their experiments on the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, and the amygdala, since previous studies had identified these areas to be critical for extinction learning. All studies with human subjects will employ comparable predictive learning tasks in at least a part of their experiments.
- At the neurochemical level, we plan to study overlapping transmitter and receptor-systems during extinction learning in several projects. Using this strategy, we intend to harvest deep insights into both the common and the distinct mechanisms of extinction learning in different systems and organisms.
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