Behavioral Neuroscience Projects

Contacts: Valter Tucci (Team Leader), Barbara Greco (Post-doc)

The availability of animal models (eg. in mouse genetics) which carry mutations that affect targeted traits, represents a unique resource for functional studies and also provides perfect models for hypothesis-driven experiments. This project aims to screen for novel behavioural mutants but also to characterise cognitive processes in mutant models for synaptic plasticity and timing abnormalities.

A number of functions in organisms require accurate temporal processing of environmental inputs in order to orchestrate the appropriate output. Organisms can process temporal information and generate responses across a wide range of timescales (microseconds to years). One of the main processes that regulates daily cycle is the circadian clock. However, this is not the only biological clock in organisms.

Timing is central to many cognitive functions, such as memory, which is the mechanism that carries information forward in time. Many neuropsychiatric and neurological interviews begin with questions about the time of day, the year and how long the patient has been there. This testifies the fundamental role of our ability to localize ourselves in time. Studies on conditioned behaviours in humans and animals have demonstrated that subjects retain another biological clock, which allows them to store memories of the duration of an inter-event interval, and subsequently to recall this information to determine the time of the conditioned response.

Lastly, an internal timing neural process serves to control the coordination of movement. The role of timing for motor control has been revealed by a number of experiments, including Pavlovian conditioning.

However, it is still unknown if motor control is organized by a single clock mechanism or by a set of interval-type timers.