Peter Rudebeck, DPhil
Professor, Department of Neuroscience
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Host(s): Daniel Salzman (Faculty), George Denfield (Postdoc)
Prefrontal and limbic mechanisms of reward-guided decision-making
How do we decide what to pursue, and how do we update our decisions as our wants and needs change? In our daily lives, our brains are constantly having to learn and update the costs and benefits associated with different available courses of action in order to optimally guide our decisions and control our affective state. I will discuss work where we have investigated how parts of the prefrontal cortex and limbic system compute the costs and benefits of different options based on the probability and type of outcomes that can be received, as well as how these computations are altered by preferences. Using a combination of functional neuroimaging, pathway-specific chemogenetics, and neural recordings in macaques, this work has pinpointed two parts of the prefrontal cortex, the ventrolateral and orbital prefrontal cortex, and their connections with the amygdala as being critical for these functions. Further using a virally-mediated RNA-barcoded approach, I will show that the connections from amygdala to ventrolateral and orbital prefrontal cortex are distinct, and these differences in connectivity mirror how both areas contribute to reward-guided behavior.
Relevant Publications:
Preferences reveal dissociable encoding across prefrontal-limbic circuits
Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, 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.
More information and a full schedule can be found here.