Description:

The department of Physiology welcomes Julia M. Cox, Ph.D.

Abstract

Choosing between different options based on the expected value of those options is a vital cognitive ability. To date, the vast majority of work investigating the neural mechanisms of value-based decision making has been done exclusively in male subjects, however. Thus, it is unclear to what extent sex differences exist in the performance or neural mechanisms that underlie this behavior. In my talk, I will present work evaluating sex differences in a self-paced probabilistic reinforcement learning task. This task allows us to evaluate two key components of value-based decision making: action selection and motivation, both of which are influenced by previous outcomes. The dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and the prefrontal cortex have been implicated in both of these aspects of decision making. To investigate how prefrontal inputs to the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) contribute to action selection and behavioral pacing, I focused on neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that project to the DMS. The ACC is a major cortical input to the DMS and is a region that encodes decision-related information and is thought to be especially important for error evaluation. I will describe experiments exploring how these neurons are involved in this task and how their function differs by sex using optogenetics and cellular-resolution calcium imaging.