Alicia Izquierdo, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychology and Behavioral Science
UCLA

Frontocortical circuits in reward learning and value-based decisions.

Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) have been assigned various overlapping roles ranging from learning and responding to reward, signaling value and uncertainty, and supporting economic decisions, to name a few. Both of these regions share reciprocal anatomical connections with basolateral amygdala, and not surprisingly, there is a great deal of functional similarity among these circuits. Using a combination of novel behavioral paradigms, DREADDs, and calcium imaging in freely-moving rats, our lab has sought better resolution of these diverse frontocortical processes. In this talk I will present data comparing OFC and ACC, together with basolateral amygdala, in flexible reward learning. Our results suggest highly overlapping, less specialized, roles for ACC and OFC in learning that point to complementary roles in keeping track of outcomes over repeated experience. Our more recent data will be discussed with an eye toward similarities in ACC and OFC function across cognitive domains. Collectively these findings have implications for how we view frontocortical contributions to flexible learning and value-based decision making across rodent and primate species.

Host Information: Katie Insel: [email protected]

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.