ABSTRACT
A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological substrates of learning and memory. Eventually this will involve a detailed cellular and biochemical description of the events in the nervous system that result in a relatively permanent change in neural transmission that allows a formerly neutral stimulus to produce or affect some behavioral response. The most definitive work on the cellular and biochemical analysis of learning and memory has been carried out in invertebrate nervous systems (Alkon, 1979; Carew, 1984; Castellucci, Pinsker, Kupfermann, & Kandel, 1970; Crow & Alkon, 1980; Hawkins, Abrams, Carew, & Kandel, 1983, Walters & Byrne, 1985). A major advance in the analysis of these questions was to choose a simple reflex behavior that could be modified by experience and then determine the neural circuit that mediated the behavior being measured. Once this was done it was possible to isolate where different types of plasticity occurred and then determine how these changes were brought about at the cellular level.
