Activity-Driven CNS Changes in Learning and Development.

摘要

The conference that formed the basis for the present volume took place in May, 1990 at the Rensselaerville Institute in Rensselaerville, New York, near Albany. This last meeting reflected the increased pace and breadth of recent research. Most important, it added a new theme to the two stressed before: its central goal was to discuss, in a connected fashion, the entire sequence of events underlying learning and development. Such a comprehensive and logical format has only become possible in the last few years. Before that, knowledge was too fragmentary to permit meaningful adherence to this framework. At the same time, recent advances have made it imperative to encourage interactions between scientists working at each level in this sequence, if understanding of learning and development is not to remain disjointed and compartmentalized. To emphasize this theme, the meeting's organization paralleled the progression from neuronal activity to altered behavior. Thus, the first session described receptormediated triggers of plasticity, the second discussed accompanying molecular events, the next two evaluated synaptic modifications resulting from these events, and the last two evaluated expression of these synaptic modifications as altered behavior of neural networks and whole animals.