Publications associées à Latency to Reward Predicts Social Dominance in Rats: A Causal Role for the Dopaminergic Mesolimbic System

Unveiling the complexity of learning and decision-making

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

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

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Elda Fischi Gomez, Gabriel Girard, 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

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

Striatal Dopamine Signals and Reward Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, Katrin Petermann, Thuy Anh Khoa Nguyen, Maria Giulia Preti, 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

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

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

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

Opposite effects of stress on effortful motivation in high and low anxiety are mediated by CRHR1 in the VTA

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Ioannis Zalachoras, Simone Astori, Mandy Meijer

Individuals frequently differ in their behavioral and cognitive responses to stress. However, whether motivation is differently affected by acute stress in different individuals remains to be established. By exploiting natural variation in trait anxiety in ...

2022

Reward timing matters in motor learning

Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Julie Duqué

Reward timing, that is, the delay after which reward is delivered following an action is known to strongly influence reinforcement learning. Here, we asked if reward timing could also modulate how people learn and consolidate new motor skills. In 60 health ...

CELL PRESS2022

Cortical ensembles orchestrate social competition through hypothalamic outputs

Hao Li

Most social species self-organize into dominance hierarchies(1,2), which decreases aggression and conserves energy(3,4), but it is not clear how individuals know their social rank. We have only begun to learn how the brain represents social rank(5-9) and g ...

2022

eNAMPT actions through nucleus accumbens NAD + /SIRT1 link increased adiposity with sociability deficits programmed by peripuberty stress

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Johan Auwerx, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Wei Huang, Laia Morato Fornaguera, Ioannis Zalachoras, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Sriparna Ghosal, Lei Cao

Obesity is frequently associated with impairments in the social domain, and stress at puberty can lead to long-lasting changes in visceral fat deposition and in social behaviors. However, whether stress-induced changes in adipose tissue can affect fat-to-b ...

2022

Stimulation of medial amygdala GABA neurons with kinetically different channelrhodopsins yields opposite behavioral outcomes

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Aiste Baleisyte

The medial amygdala (MeA) receives pheromone information about conspecifics and has crucial functions in social behaviors. A previous study showed that activation of GABA neurons in the postero-dorsal MeA (MeApd) with channelrhodopsin-2(H)(134R) (ChR2) sti ...

CELL PRESS2022

Depotentiation of associative plasticity is intact in Parkinson's disease with mild dyskinesia

Traian Popa

Objective: Depotentiation of homosynaptic plasticity of the primary motor cortex (M1) is impaired in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) who have developed dyskinesias. In this exploratory study, we tested whether this holds true for heterosynaptic plas ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2022

Meshing of Spiny Neuronal Morphologies using Union Operators

Felix Schürmann, Marwan Muhammad Ahmed Abdellah, Juan José García Cantero, Alessandro Enrico Foni, Nadir Roman Guerrero, Elvis Boci

Neurons are characterized by thin and long interleaving arborizations in which creating accurate mesh models of their cellular membranes is challenging. While union operators are central for CAD/CAM modeling and computer graphics applications, their applic ...

2022

The role of medial amygdala inhibitory neurons in regulating social behavior

Aiste Baleisyte

Aggression is an evolutionary conserved social behavior that is necessary for an animalÂŽs survival. The neural substrates coordinating aggression are known to exist in the amygdala and the hypothalamus. While the medial amygdala (MeA) and the ventrolatera ...

EPFL2021