Molecular Biology Of Early Olfactory Memory: Figure 1.

Historically, a major focus of behavioral neuroscience has been to understand learning and memory at systems, cellular, and molecular levels. Specifically, how does experience shape the nervous system such that subsequent behavioral responses reflect those past experiences? A critical tool in the search for neural mechanisms of learning and memory is an appropriate, effective behavioral model. One behavioral model that has proven useful for identifying circuit, cellular, and now molecular mechanisms of learning is early olfactory associative learning, a form of mammalian olfactory imprinting. In this issue of Learning & Memory, Yuan et al. (2003) make use of the many advantages of the early olfactory learning paradigm to shed light on the underlying molecular events that occur within the olfactory bulb and support this type of associative learning.