Parsing Reward: Identifying Distinct Neural Pathways for Specific Reward Properties

 描述(由申请人提供)：在我们复杂的社交世界中航行，关键取决于我们比较各种机会的能力，并根据我们的决策结果、其他个人和更大的社会群体获得的奖励来调整我们的行为。尽管奖励可以促进适应性决策--并提高个人和社会福利--但处理奖励的能力不足可能会影响我们的身心健康，增加人们对成瘾等重大公共卫生问题的脆弱性， 肥胖症和精神病理学。然而，理解奖励和不同公共健康问题之间的机械联系是一个重大的概念挑战，因为奖励是在社会和非社会背景下产生的，并由可能对行为产生不同影响的多种属性组成。特别是，情感奖励属性表明结果是积极的还是消极的，而信息性奖励属性则表明如何调整行为以最大化未来的回报。这个项目的主要研究目标是研究多个大脑区域之间的相互作用--特别是纹状体和前额叶皮质--如何在社会和非社会背景下支持情感和信息奖励属性。这一研究目标是对几个培训目标的补充，这些培训目标帮助申请者获得新的技能(例如，觉醒的生理记录和多变量模式分析，MVPA)，通过定向阅读和课程作业拓宽知识库，并为未来的职业生涯做准备，成为一名独立的研究人员和教师。这些培训目标将有助于申请者的长期成功，同时提供拟议研究所需的基本新技能。建议的研究利用功能磁共振成像(FMRI)结合生理测量觉醒和MVPA来研究两个特定的目标。我们的第一个目标是研究奖赏的神经解剖学路径，以检验这样的假设：a)情感和信息性的奖赏属性是由纹状体的不同亚区解码的；以及b)这些亚区显示出与前额叶皮质不同的功能连接轮廓。这一演示将具有翻译潜力，阐明了一种针对不同奖励特性缺陷的治疗方法的开发机制。我们的第二个目标是研究社会背景如何调节奖赏属性，特别是测试这样一个假设，即自主神经和神经对情绪性(但不是信息性)奖赏属性的反应可以受到社会上下文的操纵。总而言之，这些发现将进一步加深我们对塑造复杂社会行为的神经和行为机制的理解，有可能为临床医生提供新的见解，了解以社会奖励处理缺陷为标志的疾病，特别是自闭症、神经性厌食症和精神分裂症。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Navigating our complex social world depends critically on our ability to compare various opportunities and adapt our behavior based on the rewards received from the outcomes of our decisions, other individuals, and larger social groups. Although rewards can promote adaptive decisions-and enhance individual and societal welfare-deficits in the ability to process rewards can impact our physical and mental health, increasing vulnerability to a number of significant public health issues such as addiction, obesity, and psychopathology. Yet, understanding the mechanistic link between reward and different public health issues presents a significant conceptual challenge, as rewards arise in social and nonsocial contexts and are composed of multiple properties that may have different influences on behavior. In particular, affective reward properties signal whether an outcome was positive or negative while informative reward properties signal how to adapt behavior to maximize future rewards. The principal research goal of this project is to study how interactions between multiple brain regions-particularly the striatum and prefrontal cortex-support affective and informative reward properties in social and nonsocial contexts. This research goal complements several training goals that help the applicant acquire new skills (e.g., physiological recordings of arousal and multivariate pattern analysis, MVPA), broaden knowledge base through directed readings and coursework, and prepare for a future career as an independent investigator and instructor. These training goals will contribute to the applicant's long-term success while providing essential new skills needed for the proposed research. The proposed studies utilize functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with physiological measures of arousal and MVPA to investigate two specific aims. Our first aim investigates the neuroanatomical pathways for reward to test the hypotheses that a) affective and informative reward properties are decoded by distinct subregions of the striatum; and b) these subregions show distinct functional connectivity profiles with prefrontal cortex. This demonstration would have translational potential, elucidating a mechanism for developing treatments that target deficits in distinct reward properties. Our second aim investigates how social context modulates reward properties, specifically testing the hypothesis that autonomic and neural responses to affective (but not informative) reward properties can be manipulated by social context. Collectively, these findings would further our understanding of the neural and behavioral mechanisms that shape complex social behavior, potentially providing clinicians with new insight into disorders marked by deficits in social reward processing, particularly autism, anorexia nervosa, and schizophrenia.