Helen Cassaday facts for kids

Helen Cassaday is a professor at the University of Nottingham. She teaches about how the brain affects behavior.

Her Education Journey

Helen Cassaday studied Psychology at the University of Oxford. She earned her first degrees there in 1986 and 1990. After that, she got her PhD in Psychopharmacology in 1990. This means she studied how medicines affect the brain and behavior. She did this research at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London.

What She Researches

Professor Cassaday studies how animals and humans learn and remember things. Her main focus is on something called associative learning. This is how our brains connect different events or ideas. It's a key part of how we think and understand the world.

Her team works with rats and mice in the lab. They want to understand the brain's role in learning. What they learn from animals can also help us understand how people's memory changes as they get older. It also helps with understanding brain conditions where learning is affected.

Learning Over Time

Sometimes, things that are connected happen with a time gap between them. For example, you might hear a car engine noise far away before the car actually passes. Or you might smell dinner cooking before it's ready. It can be harder for our brains to connect these events if there's a long wait.

Professor Cassaday's research looks at how our brains make these connections over time. This ability can get weaker as people and animals get older. Her team wants to find out which parts of the brain help us connect events that are separated by time.

Learning and Brain Conditions

Professor Cassaday's team also studies how learning works in people with certain brain conditions. For example, in a condition called schizophrenia, people might learn about things that are not important. Normally, our brains ignore things that are not relevant.

Her research looks at how the brain decides what to pay attention to and what to ignore. They study how different parts of the brain, like the nucleus accumbens, affect this "selective learning." This work helps us understand how the brain learns and why it might sometimes learn in ways that are not helpful.

Helping People Learn

To make sure their findings can help people, some of her students have created learning activities for humans. These activities help them study how associative learning works in people.

Professor Cassaday and her colleagues have also found a way to measure stress in lab mice. This helps ensure the animals are well cared for during research.

|