Rainer Friedrich, a senior group leader at the FMI, is part of a team of researchers awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for their project, "Neuronal implementation of cognitive maps for navigation." The ¤10 million grant will fund a six-year study into how zebrafish represent their environment internally - a project that could reshape our understanding of intelligence.
Intelligent behavior depends on internal models of the world - allowing for mental simulations, strategic planning, and adaptive responses. The leading model system to study these processes are neurons specialized for specific spatial locations that collectively create a cognitive map of our environment. However, the mechanisms by which these cells work together to generate cognitive maps remain largely unknown. Previously, such spatial cells were known only in mammals and some birds. The recent discovery of spatial cognitive maps in zebrafish now offers unique new opportunities to tackle this fundamental question.
The research collaboration will exploit a critical advantage of zebrafish, which offer a unique model for studying these processes: their small, transparent brains enable researchers to record brain-wide activity during navigation and build detailed maps of neuron connections within the same organism. This interdisciplinary effort - which brings together Rainer Friedrich from the FMI in Basel, Switzerland, Herwig Baier from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Martinsried/Seewiesen, Germany, and Jennifer Li and Drew Robson from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany - aims to reveal how interactions between spatial cells create cognitive maps. ERC Synergy Grants, awarded by the European Research Council, are highly sought-after grants designed to support ambitious collaborative projects involving up to four Principal Investigators.
