Dr Ben Seymour, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford OX3 9DU
email: ben.seymour at ndcn.ox.ac.uk
We are pleased to have been awarded a 150m JPY grant to develop new collaborations between Japan, Cambridge and Princeton Universities. The focus of the research brain and immunological network modeling in chronic pain in humans and rodents, and optogenetic-fMRI.
We've just published a study showing that habenula BOLD responses correlate with aversive value in Pavlovian conditioning (modelled using reinforcement learning). We also show that these responses correlate with conditioned inhibition or excitation, which is a key functional role of pain.
Here's a link the article
Here's a link to a BBC and New York Times piece.
Many thanks to all our contributors that put together this great Special Volume for Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience. A summary is available here.
Here's a list of the papers:
Barberini, C. L., Morrison, S. E., Saez, A., Lau, B., and Salzman, C. D. (2012). Complexity and competition in appetitive and aversive neural circuits. Front. Neurosci. 6:170. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00170
Ilango, A., Shumake, J., Wetzel, W., Scheich, H., and Ohl, F. W. (2012). The role of dopamine in the context of aversive stimuli with particular reference to acoustically signaled avoidance learning. Front. Neurosci. 6:132. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00132
Kobayashi, S. (2012). Organization of neural systems for aversive information processing: pain, error, and punishment.Front. Neurosci. 6:136. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00136
McCutcheon, J. E., Ebner, S. R., Loriaux, A. L., and Roitman, M. F. (2012). Encoding of aversion by dopamine and the nucleus accumbens. Front. Neurosci. 6:137. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00137
Porcelli, A. J., Lewis, A. H., and Delgado, M. R. (2012). Acute stress influences neural circuits of reward processing. Front. Neurosci. 6:157. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00157
Rigoli, F., Pavone, E. F., and Pezzulo, G. (2012). Aversive Pavlovian responses affect human instrumental motor performance. Front. Neurosci. 6:134. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00134
Singh, V., and Khan, A. (2012). Decision making in the reward and punishment variants of the iowa gambling task: evidence of “foresight” or “framing”? Front. Neurosci. 6:107. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00107
Talmi, D., and Pine, A. (2012). How costs influence decision values for mixed outcomes. Front. Neurosci. 6:146. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00146
We have recently developed a new collaborative venture between iFReC - Japan's leading immunology research institute, CiNet and Cambridge University. The goal of this initiative is to explore theoretical and experimental models of the injury process - studying how the brain orchestrates integrated behavioural, immunological, and physiological responses to injury, and reciprocally how peripheral tissue damage influences brain function. This program extends our models of pain to general allostatic control mechanisms of injury.
Two new people have been recruited to develop this project. Aya Nakae (Assoc. Prof.) will develop projects integrating high resolution molecular and immunological neuroimaging, optogenetic fMRI, and neurophysiological responses in rodents. Masaki Maruyama (Assis. Prof.) will develop theoretical and computational models of allostasis, brain network function, and lead imaging studies in human models of injury.
This work is being funded by very generous support of the World Premier Institiute (JSPS) funding initiative. If you are interested in joining this project, to study either animals or humans or both), then please contact me about some of the funding mechanisms that are available.
Ben Seymour