Keith Kendrick
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Research summary

Keith Kendrick is a systems and behavioural neuroscientist and his group is using behavioural, electrophysiological, in vivo neurochemical and molecular approaches to study the neural substrates, neural encoding strategies and transmitter and receptor signalling pathways (particularly glutamate receptors and nitric oxide) involved in olfactory and visual recognition memory. This Laboratory investigates how neural systems are organised to control key aspects of cognitive, emotional and behavioural functions and seeks to identify the molecular signalling pathways that are involved in mediating associated plasticity changes.

We use behavioural, electrophysiological, neurochemical and molecular approaches to study the brain systems, neuronal encoding strategies and transmitter and receptor signalling pathways involved in olfactory and visual cognition. Our main focus is understanding the precise nature of changes occurring in the neural networks processing sensory cues, allowing recognition memory to form and then be recalled either just in the short-term (minutes or hours) or in the long-term (days, weeks or even years).

How new memories integrate with existing ones, are influenced by emotional context and can combine with information from different sensory modalities are also being investigated. Understanding how different global encoding principles are utilised by neural networks in the brain may ultimately help us explain why it can achieve such incredible amounts of information processing and perhaps lead to new approaches for identifying and treating neurological dysfunction. A further application of our research is modelling the principles of biological information processing and incorporation into artificial systems.