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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.

News

  • SFB 1280 Extinction Learning - accepted! Read more: RUB news portal / DFG press release
  • SFB Extinction Learning evaluated successfully! Read more
  • Julian Packheiser receives treasure chest-support! Read more
  • Young Scientists enjoyed a Lab Day with our colleagues at the University of Marburg. Read more
  • Adriane Icenhour received the promotional price of the Faculty of Medicine! Read more
  • A day with Michelle Craske. Read more
  • Kid came to office: With a mobile nursery we support parents who need to take their children with them to the office in short term. Read more

 ♥ of the press

  • Cooperation with dasgehirn.info
    The online magazine dasgehirn.info presents in cooperation with FOR 1581 and SFB 636 extinction learning as one of the most exciting current research topics between mind and brain. Read more
  • E-Book on Extinction Learning
    To provide a most recent update on research on extinction learning, Denise Manahan-Vaughan, Onur Güntürkün and Oliver Wolf from the Ruhr-University came together to create an open-access Frontier Research Topic e-book.
    Don't forget...
    In everyday life we are continually confronted with situations where previously learned information is no longer valid – a phenomenon that psychologists refer to as “extinction learning”... forschung 04/2014
    German research 3/2015