I am Javan from Singapore. I graduated with a BSc degree in Life Sciences from the National University of Singapore. After which, I joined the Inokuchi lab, Department of Biochemistry where I completed my Master’s degree course and continued onto my PhD course.
The human brain has always fascinated me with how effortlessly it performs many roles in our daily lives, even though we are still far from understanding the underlying mechanisms. In particular, our ability to produce and process language involves a plethora of processes, through which we combine the meaning of words appropriately based on learnt grammar rules to derive an overall meaning. And all these processes occur subconsciously within the blink of an eye.
Before we can tackle the more difficult neuroscience problems, such as natural language processing, there are still fundamental questions about basic brain functions to be addressed. For my current study at the Inokuchi Lab, I am investigating the transfer of learning to novel situations to enable rapid adaptation and generalisation. An example of simple learning transfer is when we recognise a pen and associate it with the word “pen” despite it appearing slightly different from the pens we have seen before.
In its highest form, learning transfer occurs between seemingly unrelated scenarios, and enable the emergence of creative ideas. This is thought to involve novel connections between unrelated mental representations. Learning transfer also enables training on one task to benefit performance on other tasks. For example, training on a working memory task can enhance reasoning skills. However, such learning transfer does not always occur, even between two versions of the same task in different sensory modalities. However, introducing an implicit commonality in a second orthogonal training task can remove blocks on learning transfer. This may involve novel connections between task representations in different modalities, similar to creativity.
With this, I seek to understand how the brain discovers such novel connections, as well as the neural mechanism underlying learning transfer. For instance, do prior encoded representations for a visual task help train neurons in the auditory cortices to enable mice to do an auditory version of the same task? Furthermore, given how sleep physiology, in particular that of rapid eye movement sleep, facilitates the co-activation of unrelated memory traces, I aim to uncover whether and how sleep mediates learning transfer.