Faculty Sponsor: Rebecca Burwell

Krisha's experiment elucidated the relationship between the perirhinal (PER) and postrhinal (POR) cortices, two regions of the brain, and their contributions to contextual memory and learning, e.g., the ability to differentiate location. She was targeting the two regions in such a way that determined if PER input to the POR is crucial and the other way around. In order to achieve this, she was targeting neurons with a laser-based mechanism that can temporarily "erase" a learned memory within a very small region of neurons. She used two behavioral tests to test the intactness of contextual memory.