The overarching interest of the Bear lab is in the question of how experience and deprivation modify synaptic connections in the brain. Experience-dependent synaptic plasticity is the physical substrate of memory, sculpts connections during postnatal development to determine the capabilities and limitations of brain functions, is responsible for the reorganization of the brain after damage, and is vulnerable in numerous psychiatric and neurological diseases and contributes to their symptoms.

Our group, centered in the MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute, and jointly affiliated with the MIT Department of Biological Engineering and the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, works on inventing and applying new tools for the analysis and engineering of brain circuits. We have been developing molecules, hardware, and methods to activate, silence, record, and analyze neural activity and circuit signaling, throughout brain circuits. We also work on ways to map the molecular structure of the brain.

We use multiple approaches including traditional- and CRISPR-based genome editing, molecular, optogenetic, electrophysiological, and imaging techniques to understand 1) how olfactory stimuli are transformed to behavioral outputs as function of learning and 2) how the immune system modulates neural circuits to shape and guide behavioral outputs.

The development of the vertebrate brain involves a phase of synaptogenesis during which the activity patterns of young neurons mediate a competition that allows only highly effective synapses to survive. These activity-dependent developmental events are responsible for many of the adaptive changes in brain wiring as children mature and it is also likely to be responsible for some of the devastating and permanent behavioral effects of genetically or environmentally caused disruptions in normal early brain activity.

The research goal of the DiCarlo laboratory is to understand the mechanisms underlying visual object recognition. Specifically, we seek to understand how sensory input is transformed by the brain from an initial representation (essentially a photograph on the retina), to a new, remarkably powerful form of representation -- one that can support our seemingly effortless ability to solve the computationally difficult problem of object recognition. 

The Fee lab studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system. Birdsong is a complex behavior that young birds learn from their fathers and it provides an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird's brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, Fee hopes the lessons learned from birdsong will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these conditions.

The Fiete group works on the mechanisms underlying memory, integration, error correction, and prediction in the brain, at the circuit level. We use theoretical and computational modeling techniques, and perform quantitative data analysis to tackle mechanistic and function-related questions. Our recent efforts fall right at the nexus of dynamics, coding, and function, as we seek to find how each influences the others.

The goal of our lab is to understand principles of brain organization that are consistent across individuals and those that vary across people due to age, personality, and other dimensions of individuality. We study the brain bases of learning, memory, emotion, and motivation, how these develop in children and adolescents, and how these differ in dyslexia, ADHD, autism, depression, and schizophrenia. Our primary methods are brain imaging (functional and structural), and the experimental study of behavior.

The same brain that can construct language, music and mathematics also lets us develop habits of thought and action. These semi-automatic routines free us to think and attend to the world. But the habit system can also be hijacked by disease and drug exposure. The Graybiel Laboratory focuses on the habit system of the brain and our remarkable ability to switch from conscious activity to nearly non-conscious behavior. The goal of this research is to understand how we make and break habits and how the neurobiology of the habit system is helping to advance understanding of human problems ranging from Parkinson’s disease to obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders and addiction.

Our laboratory studies how the biophysical features of individual neurons endow neural circuits with powerful processing capabilities, ultimately facilitating the complex computations required to drive adaptive behavior.  A principal focus of our work is the role of dendrites, the elaborate tree-like structures where neurons receive the vast majority of afferent input.  The spatial arrangement of synaptic contacts on dendrites and the interaction of various biophysical mechanisms enable complex integration of synaptic inputs – our hypothesis is that circuit-level computations are built out of these fundamental operations.

The Hockfield laboratory has studied molecular substrates of mammalian development. We identified a family of glycovariants of the extracellular matrix (ECM) proteoglycan, aggrecan, whose expression is regulated by neuronal activity early in an animal's life. Expression of the aggrecan glycoforms is regulated in parallel with critical period events and may play a role in stabilizing mature synaptic relationships.

H. Robert Horvitz has devoted much of his career to studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Only 1 mm long and containing fewer than 1000 cells, C. elegans has proved to be remarkably informative for studying many biological problems, including the genetic control of development and behavior and the mechanisms that underlie neurodegenerative disease.

The long-term objective of research in my lab is to develop a mathematical framework for understanding the link between the brain and the mind. To tackle this problem, we record and perturb brain signals in animal models while they perform mental computations. We then use normative theories, computational models, and artificial neural networks to understand the building blocks of the mind in terms of the mechanisms and algorithms implemented by the brain.

Roger Levy asks theoretical and applied questions about the processing and acquisition of natural language, with a focus on how linguistic communication resolves uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings.

Operating at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and engineering, the McDermott lab’s long term goals include understanding the computational principles underlying human hearing, improving devices for assisting those whose hearing is impaired and designing more effective machine systems for recognizing and interpreting sound.

The capacity of the brain to modify connections in response to levels of activity is termed plasticity. Plasticity is a prominent feature of brain development, and in the adult underlies learning and memory and adaptive reorganization of sensory maps. The Nedivi lab studies the cellular mechanisms that underlie activity-dependent plasticity in the developing and adult brain through studies of neuronal structural dynamics, identification of the participating genes, and characterization of the proteins they encode.

The overall goal of research in the Potter lab is to understand the very rapid processes involved in perceiving, comprehending, and remembering meaningful material such as words, sentences, or pictures. We've discovered that the meaning of a pictured scene or written word is understood in a fraction of a second, much faster than the time required for stabilizing even a brief memory of that stimulus -- unless the stimulus fits into the viewer's current mental context, like a word that is part of a sentence.

Fruit flies can learn. They can identify a specific chemical odor that they have experienced with electric shock and avoid it. Moreover, they can remember to avoid it for several days. The Quinn lab is investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying learning acquisition and memory storage by inducing and selecting single-gene mutations that affect learning or memory, and by engineering transgenic fly strains that disrupt these processes.

Bridging the fields of behavioral economics, cognitive science, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices.

The Rosenholtz lab studies a wide range of topics in visual perception, from early visual encoding, through mid-level perceptual organization, to object and scene recognition. Current interests include efficient encoding in peripheral vision and its implications for performance at virtually all visual tasks, for theories of visual attention, and for late decision-level capacity limits.

MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab lead investigator Laura Schulz studies learning in early childhood. Her research bridges computational models of cognitive development and behavioral studies in order to understand the origins of inquiry and discovery.

Using a combination of experimental and computational modeling techniques, research in the Sinha laboratory focuses on understanding how the human brain learns to recognize objects through visual experience and how objects are encoded in memory. The lab's experimental work on these issues involves studying healthy individuals and also those with neurological disorders such as autism. A key initiative of the lab is Project Prakash; this effort seeks to accomplish the twin goals of providing treatment to children with disabilities and also understanding mechanisms of learning and plasticity in the brain.

The Sur laboratory studies the development, plasticity and dynamics of circuits in the cerebral cortex of the brain. The laboratory’s goal is to discover fundamental mechanisms of brain wiring and processing, and how they go awry in brain disorders.

The main research interest in the Tonegawa laboratory is to decipher brain mechanisms subserving learning and memory. We seek to understand what happens in the brain when a memory is formed, when a fragile short-term memory is consolidated to a solid long-term memory, and when a memory formed previously is recalled on subsequent occasions. We also seek to understand the role of memory in decision-making, and how various external or internal factors, such as reward, punishment, attention and the subject’s emotional state, affect learning and memory. In summary, we study how the central nervous system in the brain enables our mind, with a focus on learning and memory.

My general area of research is the study of vision - including the processing of visual information by the human visual system, and computer vision. The goals of this research are to understand how our own visual system operates, and how to construct artificial systems with visual capabilities including, for example, aids for the visually impaired.

The Wilson laboratory studies the neural processes within the hippocampus and neocortex that enable memories to form and persist over long periods of time. We use a technique that allows us to simultaneously record the activity of hundreds of individual neurons across multiple brain regions in freely behaving animals. When combined with genetic, pharmacological, and behavioral manipulations, these recordings allow us to gain a mechanistic understanding of how animals learn and remember.