The capacity to learn and remember is fundamental for human behaviour. Through long-term research and with access to databases and other relevant infrastructure, the project aims to find out what factors influence these abilities in individuals.
From birth onwards, we make habits, learn skills and form a vast knowledge bank. The brain’s capability to incorporate various experiences relies on its plasticity. There are striking differences between individuals when it comes to plasticity and the possibility to learn, and such differences are magnified due to age, brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases. An overall purpose and goal of the work in this prioritised research area is to identify and understand various factors that affect individual differences in learning and plasticity across the lifespan.
This prioritised research area emanates from a long tradition of research at Umeå University, with access to relevant infrastructure such as databases, biobanks and brain-imaging methods. This research area brings together prolific researchers from different fields and is expected to markedly advance the research frontier and form basis for new research ideas. When fully developed, this prioritised research area will enable the study of lifelong learning and plasticity on mechanistic levels spanning from molecular and cellular, through structural and functional brain levels, all the way to applied levels such as perceived function, learning in schools, public health, and the community.
