Sex-biased neural encoding of threat discrimination in nucleus accumbens afferents drives suppression of reward behavior.

Learning to predict threat is essential, but equally important-yet often overlooked-is learning about the absence of threat. Here, by recording neural activity in two nucleus accumbens (NAc) glutamatergic afferents during aversive and neutral cues, we reveal sex-biased encoding of threat cue discrimination. In male mice, NAc afferents from the ventral hippocampus are preferentially activated by threat cues.

Ambiguity and conflict: Dissecting uncertainty in decision-making.

Making decisions is fundamental to how we navigate, survive, and thrive in our environment. The quality of information used to support decisions is rarely perfect. Many decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty, arising from ambiguous or conflicting information.

Ventral Hippocampal Afferents to Nucleus Accumbens Encode Both Latent Vulnerability and Stress-Induced Susceptibility.

Background: Stress is a major risk factor for depression, but not everyone responds to stress in the same way. Identifying why certain individuals are more susceptible is essential for targeted treatment and prevention. In rodents, nucleus accumbens (NAc) afferents from the ventral hippocampus (vHIP) are implicated in stress-induced susceptibility, but little is known about how this pathway might encode future vulnerability or specific behavioral phenotypes.

Probing relationships between reinforcement learning and simple behavioral strategies to understand probabilistic reward learning.

Background: Reinforcement learning (RL) and win stay/lose shift model accounts of decision making are both widely used to describe how individuals learn about and interact with rewarding environments. Though mutually informative, these accounts are often conceptualized as independent processes and so the potential relationships between win stay/lose shift tendencies and RL parameters have not been explored.

New Method: We introduce a methodology to directly relate RL parameters to behavioral strategy.