Cortico-striatal signaling in risk preference

描述(由申请人提供)：动物拥有在几乎每一种情况下从各种行为反应中进行选择的灵活性。决策需要一个人从感官中收集信息，以确定适当的行为反应，并考虑到替代方案可能产生的成本或回报。风险倾向和不适应决策是一系列精神障碍的特征，如药物成瘾和双相情感障碍，但也与赌博或过度扩张等常见行为有关。这项提议的目标是确定神经结构中的活动模式，这些结构涉及评估奖励和在某些结果和风险结果之间做出决定，这将告知风险偏好如何在单个神经元的活动中表现出来。老鼠将接受训练，在试验室中的两个杠杆之间进行选择，以获得不同的奖励结果(蔗糖丸)。在这些研究中，选择将基于不同的奖励幅度或收到奖励的概率。在大鼠执行这些任务时，我们将记录伏隔核(NAC)、眼眶额叶皮质(OFC)和前扣带回皮质(ACC)中单个神经元的电生理活动，这些神经元对奖励处理至关重要，被认为是根据奖励结果做出决定的重要区域，前扣带回皮质(ACC)被认为与监控冲突和风险有关。我们感兴趣的是，这个电路如何表示关于绝对奖励大小(例如‘3小球’)与可用于比较的奖励的相对价值(例如‘大于2’)的信息。我们研究的长期目标是确定这些区域的异常信号如何可能导致对奖励的不准确表示，进而可能导致对危险行为的高估。 与公共健康相关：与吸毒、赌博或过度消费(食物或商品)相关的普遍问题源于愿意从事产生危险结果的行为。这个项目的目标是确定奖励预期--基于奖励的大小和获得奖励的可能性--是如何在处理奖励和决策的重要电路中表达的。这些研究有可能确定风险偏好的潜在机制，从而确定危险行为障碍的新靶点。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Animals possess the flexibility to choose from a variety of behavioral responses in virtually every situation they encounter. Decision-making requires one to gather information from the senses to determine an appropriate behavioral response, taking into account the possible costs or rewards resulting from the alternatives. Risk-prone and maladaptive decision-making characterize a wide range of psychiatric disorders, such as drug addiction and bipolar disorder, but also pertain to such common behaviors as gambling or overextending one's credit. The goal of this proposal is to identify patterns of activity in neural structures involved in evaluating rewards and making decisions between certain and risky outcomes that will inform how risk-preference is represented in the activity of single neurons. Rats will be trained to perform tasks in which they choose between two levers in a test chamber that lead to different reward outcomes (sucrose pellets). In these studies, choices will be based on different reward magnitudes or probabilities of receiving reward. While rats perform these tasks we will record the electrophysiological activity of single neurons in the nucleus accumbens (NAC), which is critical for reward processing, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), an area thought to be important for making decisions based on reward outcome, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which has been implicated in monitoring conflict and risk. We are interested in how this circuit represents information about absolute reward size (e.g. '3 pellets') to relative value of reward useful for comparison (e.g. 'more than 2'). The long-term goal of our studies is to determine how aberrant signaling in these areas may underlie inaccurate representations of reward which may in turn lead to over-valuation of risky behaviors. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The pervasive problems associated with drug addiction, gambling, or overconsumption (of food or goods) stem from a willingness to engage in behaviors that yield risky outcomes. The goal of this project is to identify how reward expectations- based on the magnitude of the reward and probability of receiving it- are represented in circuitry important for processing rewards and decision-making. These studies have the potential to identify mechanisms underlying risk-preference and therefore new targets for disorders of risky behavior.