Newborns of many species learn to identify their mother and their home environment through the use of olfactory cues. For altricial (late- developing) animals, learning these cues is critical to survival, as the mother is the sole source of nutrition and warmth during the pre- weanling period. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues have shown that rodents, and especially neonatal animals, possess an extraordinarily good ability to learn about odors. In fact, rodents' olfactory learning capabilities may be quite as powerful as are the visual memories of humans and monkeys. He is utilizing these striking olfactory learning capacities to clarify both how and where memories are encoded within specific regions of the olfactory bulb. Dr. Wilson's previous work has shown that this early learning is associated with a measurable change in the neonate's brain, and that the response of the olfactory neurons to the learned olfactory cues shows a unique spatio-temporal pattern of activity. He is now combining intracellular electrophysiology with neuroanatomy and cellular metabolism techniques, to investigate (a) how individual cells in the olfactory bulb change their electrophysiological response as a function of learning an odor, and (b) the overall pattern of electrophysiological and metabolic activity occurring within adjacent and distant layers of the olfactory bulb. This work will further define this unique, learned response pattern, and will attempt to provide an understanding of the mechanisms involved in producing these neuronal changes, which are perhaps the cellular mechanisms of learning.
