We use a portfolio of the latest world-class techniques to understand how interactions between brain circuits for perception and reward give rise to flexible decision-making.
Goal-oriented behaviors require context-dependent decision-making strategies that optimize outcomes and achieve desired goals. Decisions are often guided by internal representations of past experiences (such as expectations about outcomes like rewards and punishments) as well as perceptual representations that reflect the current state of the world. Hence, flexible decision-making necessitates mechanisms that determine whether input from these two sources should be integrated or if one source should be weighed more heavily than another.
Our previous work has laid a solid foundation for how specific brain regions contribute to decisions guided by current experiences (such as perceptual decisions) or past experiences (such as outcome-guided decisions). However, these decisions are traditionally studied in isolation, leaving open important questions about the neural circuit mechanisms underlying flexible decision-making.
Our current work emphasizes the function of molecularly- and anatomically-defined cortical, striatal, and midbrain circuits. In addition to resolving the function of these circuits in flexible decision-making, we aim to identify general principles for information flow and computation in long-range brain circuits.