Peter Rudebeck, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Prefrontal and limbic mechanisms of reward-guided decision-making and affect

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 to adaptively guide our decisions and control our affective state. I will discuss work where we have investigated how the brain computes 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 fluctuations in preference for different types of outcomes. Using a combination of functional neuroimaging, pathway-specific chemogenetics, and neural recordings in macaques, this work has pin-pointed two parts of the prefrontal cortex, the ventrolateral and orbital prefrontal cortex, and their connections with the amygdala as being critical for these processes. Further using single neuron connectomic approaches I will show that the connections from amygdala to ventrolateral and orbital prefrontal cortex are distinct. These differences in anatomical connectivity help to provide a circuit level account of how both of these frontal areas make distinct contributions to reward guided behavior.

Faculty Host: Dr. Veit Stuphorn