Thrilled to finally share good news on a new grant for my lab! It has been a long wait after the grant received an outstanding score back in March from the NMB study section and was approved by council in early May. Anyway... time to get on it! :-)

Congratulations to Dr. Jensen Palmer, who successfully defended her dissertation today! She will be first-author on four papers on the computational and neural basis of decision making. We'll miss her and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

It's that time of the year again. #stem #finals #AI h/t Blue Laubach

Opioid stimulation of PLC had the opposite effect: Rats made decisions more slowly and showed higher decision thresholds, again without an effect of what stimulus was chosen.

Prelimbic cortex (PLC) inactivation speeds up decisions: When the PLC was inactivated, rats made decisions faster and showed reduced decision thresholds, suggesting that PLC acts as a "brake" on decision-making, controlling when a decision is made but not what stimulus is chosen.

Sex differences in decision-making: Female rats learned the task faster and were more sensitive to reward value than male rats. Females had higher drift rates in DDMs and males showed reductions in decision threshold with choice learning.

Thrilled that our paper on the role of the rat prelimbic cortex (PLC) in decision making is finally out! Three main findings are described in this thread

Co-authors: Jensen Palmer, Samantha White, and Kevin Chavez Lopez

doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Please stop by our lab's poster (PP6) by Samantha White on Sunday morning at #SfN23. She finds an emergence of choice information in spike activity and value coding in spike-LFP synchrony in rat prelimbic cortex as rats learn to make choices for the first time. #neuroskyence

Please stop by our lab's poster (PP7) by Jensen Palmer on Sunday morning at #SfN23. She found evidence for a sex difference in the initial acquisition of a visual 2AFC task and a role for rat prelimbic cortex in maintaining decision threshold using DDM modeling. #neuroskyence

Satan is now following me here. This never happened to me on Mastodon. What have I done to deserve this? LMAO