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 Rescorla-Wagner 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 “mind-brain” 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.”

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 cortico-hippocampal 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 African-American 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.