SSA: Behavioural analysis of cognitive, motivational, and hedonic aspects of reward processing

对于一个健康的生物体来说，对有益的事件（例如食物）做出适当的反应是必不可少的。因此，研究奖励处理的生物学基础为了解正常行为和精神疾病中的缺陷提供了关键的见解。对奖励的适当反应包括认知（如对环境中奖励分布的真实表征）、情感（如对不同奖励的比例享乐反应）和动机（如对不同奖励与当前生物需求之间关系的敏感性）等方面。此外，这些反应的紊乱是许多心理和精神疾病的关键方面，因此这项工作将产生更广泛的影响。本博士将研究奖励处理过程中涉及的相互作用的认知、情感和动机机制，并探索其生物学基础。最初，它将专注于药理学操作。随后，它将研究环境变化（例如，早期生活逆境），肠道微生物组的操纵（例如，膳食益生菌的管理），以及与情感异常相关的遗传和年龄相关风险因素的影响（例如，使用Tg2576和WT小鼠检查衰老和淀粉样蛋白病理）。因此，该项目将调查奖励的一般认知、动机和情感处理，并检查不同心理和生物挑战的共同生物和行为输出。该项目采用跨学科的方法，将行为分析与药理学和神经科学相结合。这将涉及用于评估认知、动机和享乐过程的定制行为分析方法。此外，它将使用磁共振（MR）光谱来评估上述操作对理论上相关大脑区域（例如，海马体，扣带/额叶皮质；由卡迪夫大学实验MRI中心支持）的脑代谢物谱的影响。在此分析之后，将使用免疫组织化学或western blot分析对蛋白质/受体表达（例如，5-HT受体亚基表达）进行靶向分析。获得这些前沿行为和神经科学工具的专业知识将使承担该项目的学生处于行为神经科学的前沿，并使他们能够在体内生物学和核磁共振光谱方面发展广泛适用的技能，这些技能在学术和工业研究领域都有很大的需求。

It is essential for a healthy organism to respond appropriately to rewarding events (e.g. foods). Thus investigating the biological substrates of reward processing offers key insights into both normal behaviour and the deficits seen in psychiatric disorders. Appropriate responses to rewards include aspects of cognition (e.g.veridical representations of the distribution of rewards in the environment), affect (e.g. proportionate hedonic responses to different rewards), and motivation (e.g. sensitivity to the relationship between different rewards and current biological needs). Moreover, disturbances in these responses are key aspects of many psychological and psychiatric disorders and thus this work will have a broader impact. This PhD will examine interacting cognitive, affective, and motivational mechanisms involved in reward processing and explore their biological underpinnings. Initially, it will focus on pharmacological anipulations. Subsequently, it will examine environmental changes (e.g. early life adversity), manipulation of the gut microbiome (e.g., administration of dietary probiotics), and the influence of genetic and age-related risk factors that have been linked to affective abnormalities (e.g. using Tg2576 & WT mice to examine aging and amyloid pathology). Thus the project will investigate the general cognitive, motivational and affective processing of rewards, and examine the common biological and behavioural outputs of different psychological and biological challenges. The project takes a cross-disciplinary approach combining behaviour analysis with pharmacology and neuroscience. This will involve bespoke behaviour analysis methods for assessing cognitive, motivational and hedonic processes. In addition it will use magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy to evaluate the impact of the manipulations described above on brain metabolite profiles across theoretically relevant brain regions (e.g., hippocampus, cingulate/frontal cortex; supported by the Cardiff University Experimental MRI Centre). This analysis will be followed up with targeted analysis of protein/receptor expression (e.g., 5-HT receptor subunit expression) using either immunohistochemistry or western blot analyses. Acquisition of expertise in these cutting edge behavioural and neuroscientific tools will position the student who undertakes this project at the forefront of behavioural neuroscience as well as allowing them to develop widely applicable skills in in vivo biology and MRspectroscopy that are in great demand within the academic and industrial research sectors.