Stan Floresco

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These data came out at a perfect time for a grant I'm retooling!

This is a fantastic study! Thanks so much Kate, congratulations to you and your team!

Disinhibition of ventral tegmental area during initial punishment learning causes enduring punishment insensitivity - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - Disinhibition of ventral tegmental area during initial punishment learning causes enduring punishment insensitivity

New paper from lab on how VTA dopamine neurons + GABA inhibition contribute to punishment learning.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Most awesome! You rock!

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Happy #CIHR notice of decision day to those who celebrate.
Congratulations to 10-15% of you 🥳, and so very sorry to the other 85+% ☹️.

13.5% is the last success rate at CIRH. The government is slowly tanking the Canadian research system.

Omg amazing! Congratulations!

I'm so sorry l! Keep strong and hope they bounce back quick

Congratulations to both you and @britt-chamberlain.bsky.social ! Can't wait to see the findings in print!

Complementary yet Dissociable Influences of Medial and Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex over Cue-Guided Decisions Involving Reward Magnitude and Uncertainty Converging evidence suggests that orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) subregions subserve distinct roles in decision-making across a variety of tasks. Cost/benefit decisions can require an organism to choose b...

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

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Thanks as always for your attention {cross posted on...the other place}

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Collectively, these results bolster a growing literature that mOFC and lOFC play distinct yet complimentary roles in the evaluation of outcomes and cues that inform the costs and benefits associated with future action. As is typical of studies of OFC function…

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What’s notable is that comparing this to previous studies where risk/reward decisions are guided by internal representations of action/outcome reward history (instead of external cues), these OFC regions play markedly different roles in guiding choice.

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Oh, BTW, when we inactivated the anterior agranular insular cortex adjacent to the lOFC, we found no changes in behavior

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Whereas disrupting lOFC activity leads to a default in pursuing the larger rewards, even if this strategy is not always the most profitable strategy.

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So both OFC regions are integral for guiding risk/reward decisions informed by cues that signal how likely certain actions may (or not) be rewarded, but do so in different way.
The mOFC helps focus on the cues, in part by shaking off the impact of recent losses…

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In contrast, lateral OFC inactivation had the opposite increased risky choice irrespective of the odds the cues signaled

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This reduction in risky choice was associated with exaggerated focus smaller rewards and recent losses, even though on this task, they should have ignored this past information and focused on the cues in front of them

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HERE is where we saw differences! Inactivating medial OFC made rats risk averse

Now the main event! Other rats played a more complex “Blackjack” task. Choosing one lever always gave a smaller reward, while the other miiight give a larger one. On this task, cues signaled if the odds were good (50%) or poor (12.5%) of getting the bigger payoff

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Here, inactivating either OFC similarly reduced choice of the more valuable option. So-both regions process non-directional cues to guide choice when “making scalar comparisons between actions that may yield something good vs something better, as opposed to nothing vs something”

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Next, instead of choosing between something vs nothing, other animals chose something good vs something better. Here the two cues signaled either a left or right choice gives a larger reward, and the opposite choice gives a smaller one.

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In a simple conditional discrimination, one cue (e.g. white noise) informed a left lever press gives reward (and right press gives nothing). Another cue (3kHz tone) signaled the opposite contingency. Inactivation of either OFC region had no effect in well-trained animals.

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Both regions have been implicated in using cues to guide reward-related approach behavior and decision making, but whether they subserve similar or dissociable functions was unclear. We use a variety of task where rats used different sound cues to guide choice between one lever vs another

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The OFC is partitioned into medial (mOFC) and lateral (lOFC) regions. We’ve known they differ in terms of interconnectivity but until recently, little work has looked at functional differences, as lOFC has gotten majority of research attention, w/ mOFC viewing lOFC all like...