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Nicholas Rawlins | |
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| Born | 1949 (age 74–75) |
| Occupation | Experimental psychologist |
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John Nicholas Pepys Rawlins (born 31 May 1949) is a British experimental psychologist, and one of the pro vice-chancellor and vice-president of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Born in 1949, he is the only son of Sir John Rawlins and the grandson of Stuart Rawlins. He was educated at Westbury House School and Winchester College before reading for a BA in Psychology, Physiology and Philosophy at University College, Oxford. He was awarded first class honours in 1971. He subsequently studied for a D.Phil at Oxford under the supervision of Jeffrey Gray. He was married to the philosopher Susan Hurley from 1986 until her death on 16 August 2007.
Rawlins is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. His research interests include animal learning and memory, brain mechanisms of memory storage, animal models of psychosis, attentional deficits in schizophrenia, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of pain in humans, and behavioural phenotyping of genetically modified mice.
Rawlins was a Fellow of University College, Oxford, from 1983 until the end of 2007, when he moved to a Professorial Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. He retains his link with University College as an Emeritus Fellow. He was appointed as Oxford University's Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Development and External Affairs on 23 June 2010. [1]
In 2018, Rawlins became Master of Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. [2] In August 2021, he was appointed as one of the Pro-Vice-Chancellors of the University.
His most cited paper is entitled "Place Navigation Impaired in Rats with Hippocampal Lesions", published in Nature in 1982 jointly with Richard G. Morris, Paul Garrud, and John O'Keefe, which as of November 2024 [update] had been cited 6,268 times, according to scite.ai. [3]
The hippocampus is a major component of the brain of humans and other vertebrates. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. The hippocampus is located in the allocortex, with neural projections into the neocortex, in humans as well as other primates. The hippocampus, as the medial pallium, is a structure found in all vertebrates. In humans, it contains two main interlocking parts: the hippocampus proper, and the dentate gyrus.
Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes,, is a British politician who was the Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992, and the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997. He was made a life peer in 2005 and served as Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2024. He is one of two living former governors of Hong Kong, alongside David Wilson.
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is a public research university in Pokfulam, Hong Kong. It was founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese by the London Missionary Society and formally established as the University of Hong Kong in 1911. It is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public research university in Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong.
In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event. Spatial memory is necessary for orientation in space. Spatial memory can also be divided into egocentric and allocentric spatial memory. A person's spatial memory is required to navigate in a familiar city. A rat's spatial memory is needed to learn the location of food at the end of a maze. In both humans and animals, spatial memories are summarized as a cognitive map.
The Morris water navigation task, also known as the Morris water maze, is a behavioral procedure mostly used with rodents. It is widely used in behavioral neuroscience to study spatial learning and memory. It enables learning, memory, and spatial working to be studied with great accuracy, and can also be used to assess damage to particular cortical regions of the brain. It is used by neuroscientists to measure the effect of neurocognitive disorders on spatial learning and possible neural treatments, to test the effect of lesions to the brain in areas concerned with memory, and to study how age influences cognitive function and spatial learning. The task is also used as a tool to study drug-abuse, neural systems, neurotransmitters, and brain development.
A place cell is a kind of pyramidal neuron in the hippocampus that becomes active when an animal enters a particular place in its environment, which is known as the place field. Place cells are thought to act collectively as a cognitive representation of a specific location in space, known as a cognitive map. Place cells work with other types of neurons in the hippocampus and surrounding regions to perform this kind of spatial processing. They have been found in a variety of animals, including rodents, bats, monkeys and humans.
Explicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory, the other of which is implicit memory. Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences, and concepts. This type of memory is dependent upon three processes: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval.
Theta waves generate the theta rhythm, a neural oscillation in the brain that underlies various aspects of cognition and behavior, including learning, memory, and spatial navigation in many animals. It can be recorded using various electrophysiological methods, such as electroencephalogram (EEG), recorded either from inside the brain or from electrodes attached to the scalp.
The hippocampal formation is a compound structure in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. It forms a c-shaped bulge on the floor of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle. There is no consensus concerning which brain regions are encompassed by the term, with some authors defining it as the dentate gyrus, the hippocampus proper and the subiculum; and others including also the presubiculum, parasubiculum, and entorhinal cortex. The hippocampal formation is thought to play a role in memory, spatial navigation and control of attention. The neural layout and pathways within the hippocampal formation are very similar in all mammals.
The Barnes maze is a tool used in psychological laboratory experiments to measure spatial learning and memory. The test was first developed by Dr. Carol Barnes in 1979. The test subjects are usually rodents such as mice or lab rats, which either serve as a control or may have some genetic variable or deficiency present in them which will cause them to react to the maze differently. The basic function of Barnes maze is to measure the ability of a mouse to learn and remember the location of a target zone using a configuration of distal visual cues located around the testing area. This noninvasive task is useful for evaluating novel chemical entities for their effects on cognition as well as identifying cognitive deficits in transgenic strains of rodents that model for disease such as Alzheimer's disease. It is also used by neuroscientists to determine whether there is a causative effect after mild traumatic brain injury on learning deficits and spatial memory retention (probe) at acute and chronic time points. This task is dependent on the intrinsic inclination of the subjects to escape from an aversive environment and on hippocampal-dependent spatial reference memory.
Rayson Lisung Huang,, was a Hong Kong chemist, who was an expert on radicals. He was the first Chinese Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong, a position in which he served from 1972 until 1986.
May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She and her former husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain.
The study of memory incorporates research methodologies from neuropsychology, human development and animal testing using a wide range of species. The complex phenomenon of memory is explored by combining evidence from many areas of research. New technologies, experimental methods and animal experimentation have led to an increased understanding of the workings of memory.
James B. Ranck Jr. is a distinguished professor of Physiology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His research involves recording from single neurons in living animals for behavioral studies. He discovered head-direction cells in 1984.
Sharp waves and ripples (SWRs) are oscillatory patterns produced by extremely synchronised activity of neurons in the mammalian hippocampus and neighbouring regions which occur spontaneously in idle waking states or during NREM sleep. They can be observed with a variety of imaging methods, such as EEG. They are composed of large amplitude sharp waves in local field potential and produced by tens of thousands of neurons firing together within 30–100 ms window. They are some of the most synchronous oscillations patterns in the brain, making them susceptible to pathological patterns such as epilepsy.They have been extensively characterised and described by György Buzsáki and have been shown to be involved in memory consolidation in NREM sleep and the replay of memories acquired during wakefulness.
John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.
Phase precession is a neurophysiological process in which the time of firing of action potentials by individual neurons occurs progressively earlier in relation to the phase of the local field potential oscillation with each successive cycle. In place cells, a type of neuron found in the hippocampal region of the brain, phase precession is believed to play a major role in the neural coding of information. John O'Keefe, who later shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery that place cells help form a "map" of the body's position in space, co-discovered phase precession with Michael Recce in 1993.
Paul Tam Kwong-Hang was Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor in the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the first university in Hong Kong and in the British-Empire-controlled East Asia region, from 2015 to 2019. Before his provostship, he has already started chairing Paediatric Surgery at HKU since 1996 for decades and has received Li Shu-Pui Professorship in Surgery since 2013.
Michela Gallagher is an American cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist. She is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. Her scientific work has changed the model of neurocognitive aging, and developed new indices for its study. Previously, work had focused on neurodegeneration as a primary cause of memory loss.