CAREER: From Perception to Action: What Songbird Mate Choice Can Teach Us About Decision Making

决定决定一个人的一生，对健康、安全和经济繁荣产生深远影响。决策过程涉及两个关键部分：评估感官刺激或预期结果的价值，并根据评估采取行动。在人类和其他哺乳动物中，涉及联合皮质和奖励中心的神经网络与刺激评估有关，而其他网络与运动规划和启动有关。目前尚不清楚的是，评估是通过什么电路来指导选择性运动激活。定义这种联系对于理解决策至关重要，这个项目将在一种新的决策动物模型中研究自然社会行为，以揭示神经系统如何在感知和行动之间建立联系。对决策和社会行为的更好理解将推动包括神经科学、心理学和经济学在内的许多领域的发展。此外，这项研究还将指导人们理解决策是如何出错的，从而有望为强迫行为和成瘾复发等行为病理提供机械性的靶向治疗。这些进步不仅将极大地提高生活质量，还将极大地提高国家的经济竞争力。这项具有广泛相关性和吸引力的研究将与教育目标相结合，即让高中生和教师参与实验室研究，培养下一代专业科学家，并通过一系列轻松和非正式的科学咖啡馆向公众传播这些和其他发现。在本项目研究的雌性鸣鸟中，它们听到的雄性鸣禽的歌声是影响雌性选择配偶的最重要因素。女性对一首特定歌曲的喜好和该喜好的行为指标很容易量化，并随着时间的推移保持一致，这为研究大脑如何编码喜好并使用这些信息来指导行为反应的选择性表达提供了一个背景。在这些实验中，研究人员将(目标1)确定男性歌曲的主观价值是如何在女性大脑中特定的神经元群体中编码的。其他实验将(目标2)确定主观价值的感觉处理指导运动行为的回路。在这些实验中，将使用集中应用的低强度光来激活或灭活这些回路，以辨别这些通路中的活动与特定行为反应表现之间的因果关系。总之，这些实验将揭示感知和行动之间的联系。

Decisions define the course of a person's life, profoundly impacting health, safety and economic prosperity. The process of decision making involves two key components: assessing the value of a sensory stimulus or anticipated outcome, and taking action based on that evaluation. In humans and other mammals, neural networks involving the association cortex and reward centers have been implicated in stimulus evaluation, while other networks have been implicated in motor planning and initiation. What remains unknown is the circuit through which evaluation directs selective motor activation. Defining this link is essential to understand decision making, and this project will investigate natural social behaviors in a new animal model of decision making to reveal how the nervous system forges that link between perception and action. An improved understanding of decision making and social behavior will advance many fields including neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Furthermore, this research will also guide understanding of how decision making can go awry, yielding the promise of mechanistically-targeted treatments for behavioral pathologies such as compulsive behavior and addictive relapse. Such advances will vastly improve not only quality of life but also national economic competitiveness. This broadly relevant and appealing research will be integrated with the educational goal of engaging high-school students and teachers in laboratory research, developing the next generation of professional scientists, and communicating these and other findings to the public through an educational series of relaxed and informal Science Cafes. In female songbirds studied in this project, songs that they hear performed by males are the most important factor influencing the female's mate choice. A female's preference for a specific song and the behavioral indicators of that preference are easily quantifiable and consistent over time, providing a context in which to investigate how the brain encodes preference and uses that information to direct selective expression of behavioral responses. In these experiments, the researchers will (Aim 1) identify how subjective value of male song is encoded in specific populations of neurons in the female brain. Additional experiments will (Aim 2) identify circuits through which sensory processing of subjective value directs motor behavior. In those experiments, focally applied, low-intensity light will be used to activate or inactivate those circuits to discern the causal relation between activity in those pathways and performance of specific behavioral responses. Together, these experiments will reveal the link between perception and action.