Research project
Noisy brains, noisy choices? Exploring age-related changes in neural circuits for decision-making
Brain activity changes as people age, which can lead to cognitive decline. By measuring and comparing brain data from mice and humans, the researcher will investigate how the brain’s noise levels change with age and affect choice behavior.
NWO Veni
As life expectancy increases and the world’s elderly population grows, it is becoming increasingly urgent to prevent the often-debilitating cognitive changes associated with old age. To do so, we must better understand the underlying neurobiological causes, and how they give rise to behavior.
Methods
Methods to link cellular degeneration to brain function and cognition have only recently become available, leaving many key questions unanswered. How does aging affect neural noise (variability in responses to repeated presentations of the same stimulus) that is relevant for behavior? How do degenerative brain changes affect the ability to learn and make decisions? And can we use mice as an animal model to study the behavioral and neural signatures of aging in humans?
To address these questions, I propose to take an integrative, cross-species approach. I will leverage my multidisciplinary background in neurobiology and psychology to combine extracellular neural recordings in mice, EEG recordings in humans and behavioral modelling across species.
Research Objectives
I specifically aim to:
(1) quantify noise levels in single neurons and neural populations, to understand how they change with age;
(2) analyze choice behavior in a dynamic decision-making task using state-of-the-art computational models, linking age-related brain alterations to decision computations;
(3) combine analyses of neural activity and choice behavior in mice and humans to investigate how age-related changes compare across species.
Together, these projects will reveal how neural computation degrades with age, giving rise to behavioral deficits. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that older brains are more noisy, limiting adaptive decision-making abilities.
This project will be a first step toward building a bridge from fundamental processes in the brain to neurocognitive aging, aiming to provide the basis for future applied research into diagnosing, slowing down and preventing
Strategic Priorities
Open Science
Research data is available at: https://docs.internationalbrainlab.org/