Maturation of circuits underlying learning and memory

Early life experiences crucially define cognitive function throughout life. Our perceptual, cognitive and emotional abilities emerge at specific times during development and are shaped by experiences that occur during early life. Early development is also a period during which key brain areas involved in emotional processing are maturing. This maturation coincides with the emergence of behaviours dependent on such networks, such as the ability to generate long lasting memories, or memory persistence. Despite convergent evidence of volumetric, structural, and synaptic changes taking place in these brain regions at the same time as memory persistence emerges, no study to date has looked at how the functional maturation of these brain circuits contributes to the ontogeny of memory persistence. To address this gap in knowledge we will use advanced optogenetic techniques to study how synaptic connectivity within isolated circuits changes across development. These are uncharted and extremely pressing research questions since presently there is no information on how circuitry-behaviour relationships emerge during early life nor how the maturation of brain circuits underlying emotional learning might affect cognitive function in adulthood.