Research Projects

The search for the fundamental mechanisms of learning and experience-dependent memory formation in the brain has long been a central quest in neuroscience. The neocortex is a particularly relevant region for plasticity because it is involved in sensory, motor, and cognitive tasks with strong learning components. However, despite many years of...

Neuroinformatics (NI) is now an essential approach in brain research, to organise, analyse, integrate and interpret an increasing volume of diverse, multi-dimensional, fine-grain neuroscience data. University of Ljubljana's (UL's) challenges in this field are suboptimal research management & open innovation (OI), slow pace of structural changes...

Small soluble protein aggregates play a key role in the onset and spreading of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. However, which oligomers are present in human disease and which are toxic remains unknown because ultrasensitive methods do not exist to detect and characterise the low concentration of oligomers, which are highly heterogeneous in...

Small soluble protein aggregates play a key role in the onset and spreading of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. However, which oligomers are present in human disease and which are toxic remains unknown because ultrasensitive methods do not exist to detect and characterise the low concentration of oligomers, which are highly heterogeneous...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia in the elderly. Accumulating evidence links AD with vascular risk factors. These correlations, together with profound alterations of cerebrovascular structure and function present in AD, suggest a “vascular hypothesis”, where vascular pathology eventually leads to neurodegeneration and...

One of the main socioeconomics challenges to be faced in the next decades will be the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) due to population ageing. Today, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of such illness is complex, a laborious process completed by a limited set of Neurologist experts who need to...

People with dementia and their care partners are often dissatisfied with the process of diagnosis, communication and recommendations after diagnosis. We aim to design with people with dementia, their care partners and clinicians recommendations and campaigns for all concerned on how to improve diagnostic process and post-diagnostic care in Europe...

Frailty leads to reduced competence in activities of daily living, independence, as well as secondary health problems and threats, e.g. falls, depression, anxiety and isolation. Frailty in persons with dementia interacts within a “vicious circle”, promoting physical decline. CO-TRAIN will develop a coaching system for functional exercise training...

Older adults show difficulties with bilingual language processing and switching compared to younger adults. For example, they need more time to switch between languages and show more cross-language intrusions. Language problems have not only been found for healthy older adults, but also in patients with dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Language...

Cognitive impairment and dementia have dramatic individual and social consequences, and create high economic costs for societies. In order to delay cognitive aging of future generations as long as possible, we need evidence about which contextual factors are most supportive for individuals to reach highest cognitive levels relative to their...

The cDAC ERC Advanced project develops and validates a theory of consciousness and its application to the understanding and alleviation of its deficits. cDAC proposes that consciousness is a virtualization memory system that monitors and optimizes the real-time control of perception, cognition and action realized in a multi-layered architecture...

New perspectives are opening in neuroscience: the era of electricity is transitioning into the era of light. Super-resolution microscopy was elected “Method of the year 2008” and optogenetics “Method of the year 2010” by the Journal Nature Methods. HOLOSTED is a biophysics project using these modern optical methods to study the effects of Alzheimer...