Grant Title: Circuit-level mechanisms of adaptive decision-making
Professor Jonathan Rubin is part of a team of researchers that has been awarded a Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) grant to study how neural activity translates into action selection. This work is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. In addition to Rubin, the principal investigators on this project are Tim Verstynen (CMU, Psychology), Eric Yttri (CMU, Biological Sciences), and Catalina Vich (U. de Illes Balears, Mallorca, Spain, Mathematics). The team will use computational modeling, neural recordings, and magnetic resonance imaging of human subjects performing decision-making tasks. The researchers will investigate reward-seeking actions in uncertain, volatile environments to analyze how activity in the brain can translate changes in reward and motivation conditions into different decision policies.