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Gluck Overview and Biography. March 2008
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Mark A. Gluck: Research Overview and Scientific Biography
Overview of Current Research Program
Mark A. Gluck is a Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University-Newark, co-director of the Rutgers
Memory Disorders Project, and publisher of the public health newsletter, Memory Loss & the Brain. For the last
twenty-five years he has worked at the interface of psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, where he
has been developing and testing computational neural-network models of animal and human learning.
Gluck’s research focuses on two main problems: How are new associations formed? And How do we
apply past learning to novel situations? The work in Gluck’s lab spans three interdisciplinary axes, integrating
across (1) animal and human learning, (2) brain and behavior, and (3) experimental and clinical perspectives.
Gluck’s research starts, conceptually, at the behavioral level, where he and his collaborators map mathematical
theories of classical conditioning to cognitive models of human learning. At the same time, they have shown
how many of these same theories of animal learning provide a framework for interpreting and informing
empirical studies of the neural bases of classical conditioning, especially the contributions of the cerebellum,
basal ganglia, and hippocampus. These two interdisciplinary links—from animal to human learning and from
behavioral theories to neural substrates—converge in providing Gluck and colleagues with the tools to study,
and formally model, how different brain regions interact during learning. In collaboration with numerous
colleagues and collaborators, Gluck utilizes a diverse array of scientific techniques including behavioral studies
of clinical patients, structural and functional brain imaging in healthy normal individuals, and human behavioral
genetics.
The clinical studies fall into two categories. The first focus on patients with damage to their fronto-striatal
circuits due to Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, frontal strokes, or fronto-temporal dementia (FTD), also known as
Pick’s disease. These clinical studies have led to novel insights into how people learn from the rewards (and
punishments) that provide error-correcting feedback about recent behavioral choices and decisions, and how the
neuromodulator dopamine is critical to this process. In turn, this research has provided potentially important
clinical insights into how medications for Parkinson’s disease alter cognitive function. Other work has suggested
novel behavioral training programs that can remediate some cognitive deficits in Parkinson’s disease by
encouraging the recruitment of brain regions not damaged by the disease.
The second group of patients studied by Gluck and his long-time collaborator, Catherine Myers, are
characterized by dysfunction to their medial temporal lobe, especially the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus.
These include hypoxic (oxygen deprivation) patients and others with global anterograde amnesia, non-demented
elderly with mild hippocampal atrophy, and patients with amnestic forms of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI),
a likely early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Studies in these patient groups have elucidated the role of the medial
temporal lobe in forming appropriate stimulus representations during learning. Gluck and Myers have argued
that hippocampal-dependent changes in representation are key for the effective transfer (that is, generalization)
of past learning to future novel task demands. This research has also provided some clinically important
outcomes, including novel behavioral assessment tools that may aid in the early diagnosis and detection of
Alzheimer’s disease as well as in the assessment of the efficacy of new therapeutic treatments.
In both the fronto-striatal and medial-temporal-lobe programs of research, the findings from Gluck’s
clinical studies are supported by converging parallel studies using functional brain imaging in healthy normal
adults. Other converging data come from studies of the behavioral implications of individual variability in genes
associated with different neuromodulators.
While the focus of Gluck lab is on human learning research, parallel animal studies provide important
comparisons to the human research. These animal studies include lesion, drug, and electrophysiological studies
in rats as well as behavioral and pharmacological studies of transgenic mice. In general, these conditioning tasks
are logically equivalent in structure and solution to the discrimination and categorization tasks studied by Gluck
and colleagues in their human research. This animal research may also lead to clinically relevant outcomes,
especially the development of novel pre-clinical animal tests to assist in the discovery and evaluation of new
therapeutic compounds for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
The computational models developed through Gluck and Myers’s program of integrated behavioral and
neuroscience research were primarily intended as tools to understand how the brain works. Nevertheless, these
Gluck Overview and Biography. March 2008
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models may lead towards novel biologically-inspired cognitive architectures for artificial intelligence, machine
learning, and cognition. With support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Administration (DARPA), Gluck and colleagues have applied their brain models to practical
problems including sonar classification, the detection of mechanical faults and other anomalies in helicopter gear
boxes and submarine pumps, and the development of new integrated architectures for autonomous robots.
Scientific Biography
Gluck’s early studies of human cognition began as an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1970s. There he
collaborated with Stephen Kosslyn on experimental studies of categorization and perception while also working
with W. K. Estes on mathematical and computational models of these experimental findings. In 1982 Gluck
moved to Stanford University to begin his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. After initially working with Amos
Tversky and Roger Shepard, he joined Gordon Bower’s lab, conducting studies of human category learning and
decision making. At the same time, he worked with Richard Thompson on computational models of the neural
circuits for classical conditioning. Impressed by the simplicity and power of Rescorla and Wagner's 1972 model
of classical conditioning, Gluck and Thompson showed how this conditioning model’s error-correction learning
algorithm could be computed by cerebellar circuits; subsequent electrophysiological studies by Thompson and
colleagues verified a key prediction of this model.
In the mid 1980s, the zeitgeist in psychology suggested that human cognition had little to gain from
looking at elementary animal conditioning behaviors. Recognizing, however, that the learning rule in the
Rescorla-Wagner model addressed many issues of interest to cognitive psychologists, Gluck proposed to Bower
that they use it as the basis for a model of human probabilistic category learning. Building upon the RescorlaWagner model's similarity to learning rules in connectionist networks, Gluck and Bower sought a closer
rapprochement between theories of animal learning and human cognition. This work became Gluck’s Ph.D.
dissertation and included experimental studies of human learning that verified surprising predictions of the
Gluck and Bower model. This established novel links between animal learning theory, cognitive models of
memory, and the decision-making heuristics of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
After receiving his Ph.D in 1987, Gluck remained at Stanford for several years with support from the NSF,
ONR, and the Sloan Foundation while he continued to collaborate with Bower and Thompson on models of
animal and human learning. David Rumelhart joined the Psychology Department at Stanford in 1987 and Gluck
became an active participant in the Rumelhart lab, working and interacting closely with Rumelhart for the next
four years. This led the two of them to collaborate on an edited book, Gluck & Rumelhart (1990), Neuroscience
and Connectionist Theory.
In 1991, Gluck moved to Rutgers University–Newark to be one of the founding faculty of a new “mindbrain” institute, the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. At Rutgers, Gluck began work on a
fundamental problem in learning and memory: What does the hippocampus do? Gluck and his new postdoctoral
fellow, Catherine Myers, proposed a new model of hippocampal function which argued that conditioning
behaviors that depend on the hippocampal region are those which require adaptive changes to the underlying
representation of stimulus events. The framework for this model drew on recent advances in connectionist
network theory, mathematical models of animal learning and attention, and Roger Shepard’s geometric theories
of similarity and psychological space.
In 1992 Gluck was awarded a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). With
their support, he and Myers began work with the Navy to apply their hippocampal model to engineering
problems in pattern recognition. They developed an automatic mechanical fault detection system for helicopter
gear boxes based on the Gluck-Myers hippocampal model. During preliminary testing, this system was able to
confirm a significant gear problem in an active-duty helicopter that the Navy mistakenly believed to be in good
working order. Gluck's contributions in this were cited in an annual report to the President as one of ONR's three
most exciting accomplishments that year.
Gluck was honored in 1996 by President Bill Clinton with the National Science Foundation’s Presidential
Early Career Award, citing Gluck’s “outstanding contributions to understanding the cognitive neuroscience of
human learning by evaluating computational models of neural networks that relate brain mechanisms to
emergent behaviors and integrating behavioral and psychobiological approaches to animal and human learning.”
Gluck Overview and Biography. March 2008
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The same year, the American Psychological Association also awarded Gluck their Distinguished Scientific
Award for Early Career Contributions citing “his many contributions at the interface between computational
modeling, associative learning, and behavioral neuroscience. His original and broadly conceived research on
historically important processes and issues in learning and memory has demonstrated quantitative sophistication
and an ability to appreciate the value of several levels of analysis. In the process, he has shown how
connectionist modeling can benefit from being constrained by both behavioral and physiological data. Already,
his work is having a major impact in the exciting new area that is emerging at the intersection of the cognitive
and neurosciences.”
Through the late 1990s, Gluck and Myers continued to develop and extend their model of corticohippocampal function, applying it to a range of animal and human learning behaviors including studies of
amnesic patients. Subsequent modeling efforts demonstrated how brain-circuit dynamics could implement
higher-level algorithms for learning and representational change, and how neuromodulators can modify the rate
at which these brain representations change over time. A broadly accessible (and non-technical) overview of this
work can be found in Gluck and Myers’s 2001 MIT Press book, Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural
Network Models of the Hippocampus and Memory.
In the last decade, Gluck and Myers have expanded their earlier computational models of hippocampal
function in conditioning to address a wide variety of learning and memory paradigms in both animals and
humans. With a grant from the NSF in 2003, Gluck and his collaborator, Russ Poldrack (UCLA), combined
functional brain imaging and clinical patient studies to explore dissociations between medial temporal lobe and
basal ganglia contributions to human category learning. A subsequent NSF grant with Mauricio Delgado
(Rutgers-Newark) in 2007 continued this work with a focus on brain imaging and patient studies of the striatum
in human learning and decision making. Working with his doctoral student, Daphna Shohamy, Gluck began to
study learning in Parkinson’s patients, which led to a grant from the NIH/NINDS in 2004 to study feedback
learning and L-dopa medication in Parkinson’s disease. A grant from DARPA in 2005 supported the expansion
of Gluck’s efforts in computational neuroscience as part of the Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures
program. Other smaller grants from NIH and private foundations have supported Gluck and Myers’s related
efforts in computational modeling and experimental studies of learning and decision making in aging, early
Alzheimer’s disease, dystonia, schizophrenia, and drug abuse.
In addition to his scientific research, Gluck has been an active leader in many areas of the scientific
community. With a grant from the J. S. McDonnell Foundation in 2002, he led a three-year international
collaborative consortium on the cognitive neuroscience of category learning (summarized in a 2008 special issue
of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews that Gluck and two colleagues guest edited). He has organized
celebratory Festschrift conferences (and co-edited the books that followed) for two of his former advisors,
Richard Thompson and Gordon Bower. More recently, Gluck began organizing international conferences in
Jerusalem on computational theory and clinical neurology, jointly hosted by Hebrew University and the Al Quds
Palestinian Medical School. This has led to Gluck initiating and coordinating new joint Israeli-Palestinian
research studies on brain and behavior.
To communicate the value of memory research to the broader public, Gluck and Myers have published
and edited since 2000 a free public-health newsletter, Memory Loss and the Brain. The newsletter covers the
latest news and information about memory impairments due to disease, injury, and aging, and current findings
on how they can be treated. It has a well-used web site at www.memorylossonline.com. The most recent issue,
with a cover story on African-Americans and Alzheimer’s Disease, is a component of a new National AfricanAmerican Alzheimer’s Disease Health Literacy Program that Gluck has been developing with colleagues at five
other urban-based centers for Alzheimer’s and memory research around the country.
Following seven years of writing, revising, and classroom beta-testing, Gluck, Myers, and Eddie Mercado
(a former postdoctoral fellow of Gluck) recently published a new interdisciplinary undergraduate textbook,
Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior, which appeared in early 2008. It is the first textbook developed
from its inception to reflect the convergence of brain studies and behavioral approaches in modern learning and
memory research, incorporating findings in both animals and humans. Each chapter integrates coverage of
human memory and animal learning, with separate sections specifically devoted to behavioral processes, brain
systems, and clinical perspectives.