Publications related to Reward system

Involvement of prelimbic cortex neurons and related circuits in the acquisition of a cooperative learning by pairs of rats

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Elias Georges Gebara, Ana del Rocio Conde Moro

Social behaviors such as cooperation are crucial for mammals. A deeper knowledge of the neuronal mechanisms underlying cooperation can be beneficial for people suffering from pathologies with impaired social behavior. Our aim was to study the brain activit ...

Springer2024

White adipose tissue distribution and amount are associated with increased white matter connectivity

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Gabriel Girard, Elda Fischi Gomez, Philipp Johannes Koch, Liana Okudzhava

Obesity represents a significant public health concern and is linked to various comorbidities and cognitive impairments. Previous research indicates that elevated body mass index (BMI) is associated with structural changes in white matter (WM). However, a ...

Wiley2024

Unveiling the complexity of learning and decision-making

Wei-Hsiang Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for learning to adapt to new environments. In RL, the prediction error is an important component that compares the expected and actual rewards. Dopamine plays a critical role in encoding these prediction errors. In my ...

EPFL2024

Computational models of intrinsic motivation for curiosity and creativity

Wulfram Gerstner, Alireza Modirshanechi, Sophia Becker

We link Ivancovsky et al.'s novelty-seeking model (NSM) to computational models of intrinsically motivated behavior and learning. We argue that dissociating different forms of curiosity, creativity, and memory based on the involvement of distinct intrinsic ...

2024

Striatal Dopamine Signals and Reward Learning

Carl Petersen, Sylvain Crochet, Parviz Ghaderi, Mauro Pulin, Anthony Pierre Robert Renard, Christos Sourmpis, Pol Bech Vilaseca, Meriam Malekzadeh, Robin François Virginien Dard, Yanqi Liu

We are constantly bombarded by sensory information and constantly making decisions on how to act. In order to optimally adapt behavior, we must judge which sequences of sensory inputs and actions lead to successful outcomes in specific circumstances. Neuro ...

Oxford Univ Press2023

Mitofusin-2 in nucleus accumbens D2-MSNs regulates social dominance and neuronal function

Bernard Schneider, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Elias Georges Gebara, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Alessandro Chioino, Sriparna Ghosal, Eva Ramos Fernandez

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a brain hub regulating motivated behaviors, including social competitiveness. Mitochondrial function in the NAc links anxiety with social competitiveness, and the mitochondrial fusion protein mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) in NAc neurons ...

2023

Plasticity of sensory representations in the posterior insular cortex during fear learning

Denys Osypenko

Aversively-motivated associative learning allows animals to avoid harm and thus ensures survival. Aversive learning can be studied by the fear learning paradigm, in which an innocuous sensory stimulus like a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS), acquires a nega ...

EPFL2023

Longitudinal evaluation of the mechanisms supporting post-stroke motor recovery using TMS-EEG coupling

Andéol Geoffroy Cadic-Melchior

Stroke is the main source of long-lasting disability, affecting dominantly motor functions. The extent and course of recovery are highly heterogeneous between patients, with a minority of patients fully recovering from their initial impairments, leaving 85 ...

EPFL2023

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

GABAergic-like dopamine synapses in the brain

Maria Reva

Dopamine synapses play a crucial role in volitional movement and reward-related behaviors, while dysfunction of dopamine synapses causes various psychiatric and neurological disorders. Despite this significance, the true biological nature of dopamine synap ...

2023

Noninvasive theta-burst stimulation of the human striatum enhances striatal activity and motor skill learning

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Pablo Maceira Elvira, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Elena Beanato, Fabienne Windel, Esra Neufeld, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Chang-Hyun Park, Traian Popa, Pauline Menoud

The stimulation of deep brain structures has thus far only been possible with invasive methods. Transcranial electrical temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) is a novel, noninvasive technology that might overcome this limitation. The initial proof-of-co ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Linking connectivity of deep brain stimulation of nucleus accumbens area with clinical depression improvements: a retrospective longitudinal case series

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Maria Giulia Preti, Thuy Anh Khoa Nguyen, Katrin Petermann, Simona Leserri

Treatment-resistant depression is a severe form of major depressive disorder and deep brain stimulation is currently an investigational treatment. The stimulation's therapeutic effect may be explained through the functional and structural connectivities be ...

Springer Heidelberg2024

Acute TNF alpha levels predict cognitive impairment 6-9 months after COVID-19 infection

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Alessandra Griffa, Alexandre Cionca, Idris Guessous

Background: A neurocognitive phenotype of post-COVID-19 infection has recently been described that is characterized by a lack of awareness of memory impairment (i.e., anosognosia), altered functional connectivity in the brain's default mode and limbic netw ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

Markers of limbic system damage following SARS-CoV-2 infection

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Alessandra Griffa, Alexandre Cionca, Idris Guessous

Alterations of the limbic system may be present in the chronic phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our aim was to study the long-term impact of this disease on limbic system-related behaviour and its associated brain functional connectivity, according to the se ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

Transcriptomic analysis reveals mitochondrial pathways associated with distinct adolescent behavioral phenotypes and stress response

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Thamyris Silva

Adolescent individuals exhibit great variability in cortical dynamics and behavioral outcomes. The developing adolescent brain is highly sensitive to social experiences and environmental insults, influencing how personality traits emerge. A distinct patter ...

2023

Computational models of episodic-like memory in food-caching birds

Wulfram Gerstner, Johanni Michael Brea

How the 'what', 'where', and 'when' of past experiences are stored in episodic memories and retrieved for suitable decisions remains unclear. In an effort to address these questions, the authors present computational models of neural networks that behave l ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Dopamine Dynamics in Reward-based Learning

Jun Huang

Dopamine signals are thought to be important for reward-based learning and appear to play important roles in regulating synaptic plasticity in the nucleus accumbens and the striatum. However, the precise neuronal circuit mechanisms underlying the learning ...

EPFL2022

Glutathione in the nucleus accumbens regulates motivation to exert reward-incentivized effort

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Lijing Xin, Ioannis Zalachoras, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Fiona Hollis, Pascal Steiner, Alina Veronika Irene Strasser, Eva Ramos Fernandez

Emerging evidence is implicating mitochondrial function and metabolism in the nucleus accumbens in motivated performance. However, the brain is vulnerable to excessive oxidative insults resulting from neurometabolic processes, and whether antioxidant level ...

2022

Identifiability and Generalizability from Multiple Experts in Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Volkan Cevher, Paul Thierry Yves Rolland, Luca Viano, Boris Nikolov

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert’s behavior. It is well known that, in general, variou ...

2022

Safety in Numbers: Asymptotic Analysis of a Monitoring Problem

Emre Telatar, Reka Inovan

In this work, we introduce a setup where a monitoring entity attempts to distinguish a cheating player among a group of regular players where all players behave in order to maximize their reward. We assume that the cheating player has an "information advan ...

IEEE2022