Dr. Bruce McNaughton neuroscientist and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. The main focus of Dr. McNaughton’s research is the physiological and computational basis of cognition, with particular focus on brain mechanisms of memory and spatial orientation, and on the dynamic interactions among neuronal populations that underlie these phenomena. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of central synaptic plasticity mechanisms underlying memory, spatial information processing in the hippocampal formation and cortex, cortico-hippocampal interactions and memory consolidation, and the ageing of the nervous system. In addition, he was the originator of the currently most widely used technology for simultaneous recording from large numbers of single brain cells in behaving animals ('tetrodes'). This advanced technology has opened an unprecedented new window on understanding brain mechanisms of cognitive processing and their disorders due to ageing, brain disease, substance abuse, developmental disorders and brain trauma. His current activities focus on theoretical and empirical study of the neural mechanisms underlying spatial orientation, the reactivation of memory traces in the cortex during sleep following learning and the role of this process in memory consolidation and the extraction of semantic knowledge from episodic memory.
