During our waking hours, our brains are inundated with sensory information that shifts from one moment to the next.
Recognizing meaningful associations between different snippets of this information is a basic form of learning that is essential for survival, even for animals with much simpler brains than our own. For learning to occur, these associations must be made and reinforced in some way at the neuronal level, but how this happens is poorly understood. Research reported this week sheds light on this problem by identifying a group of neurons whose activity changes during the learning process in a way that reflects the new association that is formed between two different sensory stimuli.
The findings are reported in Current Biology by André Fiala and colleagues at Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-University Wurzburg, Germany.