The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has approved sixteen grant applications in the field of Exact and Natural Sciences, one of which is led by researchers from Radboud University. The grants, ranging from 400,000 to 800,000 euros, are intended to support innovative, high-quality fundamental research of scientific urgency.
About the project
The project, titled “The Cortex as a Fast but Adaptive Learning System,” is led by Lisa Genzel and Fleur Zeldenrust, both of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior at Radboud University.
Our cortical memory system extracts salient, overlapping information across multiple experiences to create our world knowledge of facts and objects. Until now, researchers have believed that the cortex is responsible for slow learning and requires input from the brain’s fast learning system: the hippocampus. In this project, however, the researchers propose that the cortex is a fast but adaptive learning system, capable of learning quickly when no prior knowledge exists, but learning more slowly when we have prior information. This is being tested in this project through experiments with mice and computer models