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SUMMARY:Lausanne Neuroscience Seminar // Bita Moghaddam - “Impact of anx
 iety on action  encoding”
DTSTART:20190312T170000
DTEND:20190312T180000
DTSTAMP:20260930T202129Z
UID:c67bc5030c5f391c44617bc43fc41e770b0a4d4eb59c5d1a4ceb2874
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Bita Moghaddam PhD\nDepartment of Behavioral Neuroscience\nOre
 gon Health & Sci Univ\nPortland OR  - USA\nThe prefrontal cortex (PFC) has
  been dubbed the “doer cortex” with a primary role of representing and
  selecting purposeful actions.  In the context of psychiatric disorders\,
  much of the neuronal data and computational work on the PFC encoding of b
 ehavior focuses on the representation (or perception) of internal and exte
 rnal events that precede these actions. We have been interested in the enc
 oding of goal-directed actions per se by PFC neurons and how it is affecte
 d by anxiety. The focus on anxiety stems from the fact that its relevance 
 to mental health extends well beyond anxiety disorders. Critically\, anxie
 ty is a debilitating symptom of most psychiatric disorders including PTSD\
 , major depression\, autism\, schizophrenia and addiction. Anxiety is ofte
 n studied as a stand-alone construct in laboratory animals that focuses on
  fear responses. But in the context of coping with real-life anxiety\, its
  negative impacts extend beyond aversive feelings to involve disruptions i
 n ongoing goal-directed behaviors and cognitive functioning. I will presen
 t data from two distinct models of anxiety that allowed us to perform ense
 mble and local field potential recordings during reward-guided goal-direct
 ed behaviors.  We find that anxiety diminishes the recruitment of action 
 encoding neurons and the coordinated activity between PFC and dopamine neu
 rons. These results provide mechanistic insight for how anxiety diminishes
  rule-based guidance of behavior and single out encoding of actions\, as o
 pposed to cues or outcomes\, by PFC neurons as particularly vulnerable to 
 anxiety. \n 
LOCATION:SV 1717 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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