Dorsal hippocampus represents locations to avoid as well as locations to approach during approach-avoidance conflict.

Worrying about perceived threats is a hallmark of multiple psychological disorders including anxiety. This concern about future events is particularly important when an individual is faced with an approach-avoidance conflict. Potential goals to approach are known to be represented in the dorsal hippocampus during theta cycles.

Mental Time Travel: A Retrospective.

Because imagination activates the same neural circuits used in understanding the present, one can access that imagination even in non-linguistic animals through decoding techniques applied to large neural ensembles. This personal retrospective traces the history of the initial discovery that hippocampal theta sequences sweep forward to goals during moments of deliberation and discusses the history that was necessary to put ourselves in the position to recognize this signal. It also discusses how that discovery fits into the larger picture of hippocampal function and the concept of cognition as computation.

Contingency management for monosubstance use disorders: Systematic review and assessment of predicted versus obtained effects.

Contingency management (CM) is notably successful as a substance use disorder treatment and is most effective when targeting monosubstance use. Evidence suggests the effects of CM exceed predictions based on the value of the incentives delivered for monosubstance abstinence. In this systematic review, we examine common variations of CM interventions applied to a single substance to determine what factors may contribute to the larger effect.

Environmental complexity modulates information processing and the balance between decision-making systems.

Behavior in naturalistic scenarios occurs in diverse environments. Adaptive strategies rely on multiple neural circuits and competing decision systems. However, past studies of rodent decision making have largely measured behavior in simple environments.

Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind.

Nucleus accumbens dopamine signaling is an important neural substrate for decision-making. Dominant theories generally discretize and homogenize decision-making, when it is in fact a continuous process, with evaluation and re-evaluation components that extend beyond simple outcome prediction into consideration of past and future value. Extensive work has examined mesolimbic dopamine in the context of reward prediction error, but major gaps persist in our understanding of how dopamine regulates volitional and self-guided decision-making.

Higher-order interactions between hippocampal CA1 neurons are disrupted in amnestic mice.

Across systems, higher-order interactions between components govern emergent dynamics. Here we tested whether contextual threat memory retrieval in mice relies on higher-order interactions between dorsal CA1 hippocampal neurons requiring learning-induced dendritic spine plasticity. We compared population-level Ca2 transients as wild-type mice (with intact learning-induced spine plasticity and memory) and amnestic mice (TgCRND8 mice with high levels of amyloid-β and deficits in learning-induced spine plasticity and memory) were tested for memory.

Dorsal hippocampus represents locations to avoid as well as locations to approach during approach-avoidance conflict.

Worrying about perceived threats is a hallmark of multiple psychological disorders including anxiety. This concern about future events is particularly important when an individual is faced with an approach-avoidance conflict. Potential goals to approach are known to be represented in the dorsal hippocampus during theta sweeps.

Clarifying Cognitive Control Deficits in Psychosis via Drift Diffusion Modeling and Attractor Dynamics.

Background And Hypothesis: Cognitive control deficits are prominent in individuals with psychotic psychopathology. Studies providing evidence for deficits in proactive control generally examine average performance and not variation across trials for individuals-potentially obscuring detection of essential contributors to cognitive control. Here, we leverage intertrial variability through drift-diffusion models (DDMs) aiming to identify key contributors to cognitive control deficits in psychosis.

Measuring excitation-inhibition balance through spectral components of local field potentials.

The balance between excitation and inhibition is critical to brain functioning, and dysregulation of this balance is a hallmark of numerous psychiatric conditions. Measuring this excitation-inhibition (E:I) balance has remained difficult, but theoretical models have proposed that characteristics of local field potentials (LFP) may provide an accurate proxy. To establish a conclusive link between LFP and E:I balance, we recorded single units and LFP from the prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of rats during decision making.

Reward prediction-errors weighted by cue salience produces addictive behaviours in simulations, with asymmetrical learning and steeper delay discounting.

Dysfunction in learning and motivational systems are thought to contribute to addictive behaviours. Previous models have suggested that dopaminergic roles in learning and motivation could produce addictive behaviours through pharmacological manipulations that provide excess dopaminergic signalling towards these learning and motivational systems. Redish (2004) suggested a role based on dopaminergic signals of value prediction error, while (Zhang et al.

Clarifying Cognitive Control Deficits in Psychosis via Drift Diffusion Modeling.

Cognitive control deficits are consistently identified in individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic psychopathologies. In this analysis, we delineated proactive and reactive control deficits in psychotic psychopathology via hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modeling (hDDM). People with psychosis (PwP; N=123), their first-degree relatives (N=79), and controls (N=51) completed the Dot Pattern Expectancy task, which allows differentiation between proactive and reactive control.

Strategy dependent recruitment of distributed cortical circuits during spatial navigation.

Spatial navigation is a complex cognitive process that involves neural computations in distributed regions of the brain. Little is known about how cortical regions are coordinated when animals navigate novel spatial environments or how that coordination changes as environments become familiar. We recorded mesoscale calcium (Ca) dynamics across large swathes of the dorsal cortex in mice solving the Barnes maze, a 2D spatial navigation task where mice used random, serial, and spatial search strategies to navigate to the goal.

Distinct mesoscale cortical dynamics encode search strategies during spatial navigation.

Spatial navigation is a complex cognitive process that involves neural computations in distributed regions of the brain. Little is known about how cortical regions are coordinated when animals navigate novel spatial environments or how that coordination changes as environments become familiar. We recorded mesoscale calcium (Ca) dynamics across large swathes of the dorsal cortex in mice solving the Barnes maze, a 2D spatial navigation task where mice used random, serial, and spatial search strategies to navigate to the goal.

Human generalization of internal representations through prototype learning with goal-directed attention.

The world is overabundant with feature-rich information obscuring the latent causes of experience. How do people approximate the complexities of the external world with simplified internal representations that generalize to novel examples or situations? Theories suggest that internal representations could be determined by decision boundaries that discriminate between alternatives, or by distance measurements against prototypes and individual exemplars. Each provide advantages and drawbacks for generalization.

Optogenetic disruption of the prelimbic cortex alters long-term decision strategy but not valuation on a spatial delay discounting task.

Rats demonstrate a preference for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones, a phenomenon known as delay-discounting (DD). Behavior arises from the interaction of multiple decision-making systems, and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been identified as a central component in the mediation between these decision systems. To investigate the role of the prelimbic (PL) subregion of mPFC on decision strategy interaction, we compared two cohorts of rats (ChR2-opsin-expressing 'Active' and opsin-absent 'Control') on a spatial delay-discounting task while delivering in-vivo light stimulation into PL at the choice point of select trials.

On the Role of Theory and Modeling in Neuroscience.

In recent years, the field of neuroscience has gone through rapid experimental advances and a significant increase in the use of quantitative and computational methods. This growth has created a need for clearer analyses of the theory and modeling approaches used in the field. This issue is particularly complex in neuroscience because the field studies phenomena that cross a wide range of scales and often require consideration at varying degrees of abstraction, from precise biophysical interactions to the computations they implement.

Differential processing of decision information in subregions of rodent medial prefrontal cortex.

Decision-making involves multiple cognitive processes requiring different aspects of information about the situation at hand. The rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been hypothesized to be central to these abilities. Functional studies have sought to link specific processes to specific anatomical subregions, but past studies of mPFC have yielded controversial results, leaving the precise nature of mPFC function unclear.

Sunk cost sensitivity during change-of-mind decisions is informed by both the spent and remaining costs.

Sunk cost sensitivity describes escalating decision commitment with increased spent resources. On neuroeconomic foraging tasks, mice, rats, and humans show similar escalations from sunk costs while quitting an ongoing countdown to reward. In a new analysis taken across computationally parallel foraging tasks across species and laboratories, we find that these behaviors primarily occur on choices that are economically inconsistent with the subject's other choices, and that they reflect not only the time spent, but also the time remaining, suggesting that these are change-of-mind re-evaluation processes.

Etiopathogenic Models of Psychosis Spectrum Illnesses Must Resolve Four Key Features.

Etiopathogenic models for psychosis spectrum illnesses are converging on a number of key processes, such as the influence of specific genes on the synthesis of proteins important in synaptic functioning, alterations in how neurons respond to synaptic inputs and engage in synaptic pruning, and microcircuit dysfunction that leads to more global cortical information processing vulnerabilities. Disruptions in prefrontal operations then accumulate and propagate over time, interacting with environmental factors, developmental processes, and homeostatic mechanisms, eventually resulting in symptoms of psychosis and disability. However, there are 4 key features of psychosis spectrum illnesses that are of primary clinical relevance but have been difficult to assimilate into a single model and have thus far received little direct attention: 1) the bidirectionality of the causal influences for the emergence of psychosis, 2) the catastrophic clinical threshold seen in first episodes of psychosis and why it is irreversible in some individuals, 3) observed biotypes that are neurophysiologically distinct but clinically both convergent and divergent, and 4) a reconciliation of the role of striatal dopaminergic dysfunction with models of prefrontal cortical state instability.

Beyond Description and Deficits: How Computational Psychiatry Can Enhance an Understanding of Decision-Making in Anorexia Nervosa.

Purpose Of Review: Despite decades of research, knowledge of the mechanisms maintaining anorexia nervosa (AN) remains incomplete and clearly effective treatments elusive. Novel theoretical frameworks are needed to advance mechanistic and treatment research for this disorder. Here, we argue the utility of engaging a novel lens that differs from existing perspectives in psychiatry.

Computational validity: using computation to translate behaviours across species.

We propose a new conceptual framework (computational validity) for translation across species and populations based on the computational similarity between the information processing underlying parallel tasks. Translating between species depends not on the superficial similarity of the tasks presented, but rather on the computational similarity of the strategies and mechanisms that underlie those behaviours. Computational validity goes beyond construct validity by directly addressing questions of information processing.

Dorsolateral Striatal Task-initiation Bursts Represent Past Experiences More than Future Action Plans.

The dorsolateral striatum (DLS) is involved in learning and executing procedural actions. Cell ensembles in the DLS, but not the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), exhibit a burst of firing at the start of a well-learned action sequence ("task-bracketing"). However, it is currently unclear what information is contained in these bursts.

Certainty and uncertainty of the future changes planning and sunk costs.

Many foraging experiments have found that subjects are suboptimal in foraging tasks, waiting out delays longer than they should given the reward structure of the environment. Additionally, theories of decision-making suggest that actions arise from interactions between multiple decision-making systems and that these systems should depend on the availability of information about the future. To explore suboptimal behavior on foraging tasks and how varying the amount of future information changed behavior, we ran rats on two matching neuroeconomic foraging tasks, Known Delay (KD) and Randomized Delay (RD), with the only difference between them being the certainty of the cost of future opportunities.

Formalizing planning and information search in naturalistic decision-making.

Decisions made by mammals and birds are often temporally extended. They require planning and sampling of decision-relevant information. Our understanding of such decision-making remains in its infancy compared with simpler, forced-choice paradigms.

Disrupting the medial prefrontal cortex with designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drug alters hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and their associated cognitive processes.

The hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) interact during a myriad of cognitive processes including decision-making and long-term memory consolidation. Exactly how the mPFC and hippocampus interact during goal-directed decision-making remains to be fully elucidated. During periods of rest, bursts of high-frequency oscillations, termed sharp-wave ripple (SWR), appear in the local field potential.