The Behavioural Neuroscience group investigates the fundamental learning and memory processes that form the fabric of our mental life. Behavioural, psychopharmacological, neuroanatomical and genetic approaches are used to understand the mechanics of learning and its underlying biology. We also examine higher order processes, such as the dependence of learned associations on context. This understanding of learning is also applied to the clinical study of diseases in which associative processes are disordered. For example, in schizophrenia, we find that learning occurs inappropriately about stimuli that would normally be treated as irrelevant, redundant or in some other way indistinct. In applied studies, we find evidence that bio-associative mechanisms may contribute to increased symptom reporting in clinical (eg Gulf war veterans) and non-clinical samples (eg people feeling ill at work).

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