Thursday
March 20, 3pm
HSC 4E20

Stan Floresco PhD
Professor
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia

"Uncertainty, Choice and Dopamine"

Dear MiNDS students & faculty,

I am pleased to invite you to attend the MiNDS BRAIN AWARENESS WEEK Colloquium TODAY Thursday March 20th at 3:00 in HSC 4E20. Bring your coffee cup for coffee and cookies before the talk at 2:45.

Dr. Stan Floresco is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, a member of the UBC Brain Research Center Institute, and a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He received his BSc in Psychology in 1994, his MA in Psychology in 1996, and his PhD 2000, all at the University of British Columbia under the mentorship of Anthony Phillips. He was a Human Frontiers Science Organization postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Anthony Grace at the University of Pittsburgh until 2003, after which he returned to UBC to take up his current position.

Dr Floresco has published over 75 papers on his research that employs behavioral and neurophysiological approaches to study neural circuits within the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system that facilitate cognitive processes such as behavioural flexibility, cost/benefit decision making and reward-related learning, using rodents as a model system. His work is currently funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Stan's talk will be about choosing between smaller, assured rewards or larger, uncertain ones requires reconciliation of competing biases towards more certain or riskier options. These conflicting urges reflect an interplay between distributed neural circuits linking the frontal lobes to subcortical regions that process emotional and reward-related information that in turn influence response selection. Each of these regions is interconnected with the dopamine system. Subcortical circuitry linking the amygdala and the ventral striatum appears to promote a more visceral bias towards larger, uncertain rewards, whereas prefrontal regions serve to temper these urges when riskier options become less profitable via top-down control over the amygdala. Dopamine transmission within these regions also makes dissociable, yet complementary, contributions to risk/reward judgments, promoting either exploitation of current favorable circumstances or exploration of more profitable ones when conditions change. Dynamic fluctuations in tonic dopamine transmission in the prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens appear to encode distinct types of information related to decision making related to changes in reward availability, uncertainty and choice biases. In addition, phasic dopamine activity, regulated in part by the lateral habenula plays a key role in providing short-term information about recent outcomes that can bias subsequent choice behavior. These findings provide insight into the dynamic competition between these cortical/subcortical circuits that shape our decision biases and underlie conflicting urges when evaluating options that vary in terms of potential risks and rewards.

We look forward to seeing you all at the talk today.

Regards

Kathy

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Kathryn M Murphy PhD

Professor and Director MiNDS Graduate Program

Dept of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour

McMaster University

1280 Main St W

Hamilton ON L8S 4K1