Organising knowledge for flexible behaviour in the prefrontal hippocampal circuitry

If you burn a cake, you know that you may need to bake it for less time next time. This will be based on your understanding, or ‘model’, of how to bake a cake. This project will try to understand what such models might look like and how they are built in the brain. 

We will study mice as they use such models to guide their behaviour. We will record cells in key brain regions as the mice carry out behavioural tests that we have developed which require complex internal models. We understand the models mathematically and this allows us to interrogate general principles about how models are represented.  

These principles will lay the groundwork for understanding how these mechanisms of organising knowledge go wrong in people with mental health problems.