NEURAL CIRCUITS FOR FLEXIBLE, LIFELONG LEARNING
WE STUDY THE NEURAL CIRCUITS AND BEHAVIORAL STRATEGIES THAT UNDERLIE LEARNING ACROSS THE LIFESPAN
Humans and animals continuously acquire, adapt, and maintain a rich set of context-specific actions, with the ability to retain and apply them evolving throughout life. In health, we balance learning new behaviors while preserving or adjusting existing abilities. In disease, we may struggle to recall familiar knowledge, raising the question of whether it is lost or simply dormant. The Kuchibotla Lab builds scalable behavioral paradigms, longitudinally records neural activity across brain regions, and uses precise circuit perturbations to reveal how the brain acquires, stores, and reuses knowledge across time—and how it fails in aging and disease.
featured publications
Rapid emergence of latent knowledge in the sensory cortex drives learning
Drieu, C., Zhu, Z., Wang, J., Fuller K., Wang, A., Elnozahy S., Kuchibhotla K.V. Nature (2025), 641: 960-970
Performance errors during rodent learning reflect a dynamic choice strategy
Zhu, Z., Kuchibhotla, K.V. Current Biology (2024)
