Conférence « Functional circuits involved in motor learning »  

Le Prof. Agnès Gruart de l’Universidad Pablo de Olavide à Séville sera de passage à Bruxelles en novembre prochain.  Elle tiendra à cette occasion, une conférence intitulée « Functional circuits involved in motor learning »

“ »Il n’y a pas d’action ou de traitement cognitif qui puisse être fait sans le cerveau »”

L’Ecole Doctorale des Sciences de la Motricité du FNRS vous y invite toutes et tous, et dans l’attente de vous rencontrer nombreux à cette occasion, vous trouverez ci-dessous, un extrait de sa communication. 

Contact pour plus d’informations : Prof Guy Chéron / gcheron@ulb.ac.be au 02/555 34 03

La conférence aura lieu le 19 novembre 2018 à 12h30 à l’ULB sur le campus Erasme à la Faculté des Sciences de la Motricité / Bâtiment N / Niveau 3 – Auditoire N.3.111


The complexity of brain functions can only be approached by a multidisciplinary and comparative approach. The availability of genetically manipulated mammals (mice and rats) and of sophisticated electrophysiological techniques, susceptible of being applied in behaving animals during the acquisition of new motor abilities, have largely facilitated this approach.

Our group has studied for years the contribution of sensory, motor, premotor, hippocampal, and prefrontal circuits to non-associative, pavlovian, and instrumental learning paradigms. For this, we have recorded activity dependent changes in strength in cortical and subcortical synapses during the respective acquisition process.

Recently we have concentrated our attention to the contribution of prefrontal circuits to the acquisition and storage of instrumental learning tasks, including cooperative learning and decision making in mice and rats.  The main hypothesis of our studies is that learning is the result of the activity of wide cortical and subcortical circuits activating functional properties of involved synaptic nodes. In particular, unitary firing, synaptic and local field  potentials recorded in prefrontal sites are modified during the acquisition of the abovementioned tasks.   

In addition,  I will present recent evidences on the available information from our laboratory with respect to the use of these functional states for brain-machine interphase in behaving rats and for  coordinated cooperation between pairs of rats aimed to achieve simultaneous rewards.