CAREER: From Perception to Action: What Songbird Mate Choice Can Teach Us About Decision Making

University Of Wyoming, Laramie WY

Investigators

Abstract

Decisions define the course of a person's life, profoundly impacting health, safety and economic prosperity. The process of decision making involves two key components: assessing the value of a sensory stimulus or anticipated outcome, and taking action based on that evaluation. In humans and other mammals, neural networks involving the association cortex and reward centers have been implicated in stimulus evaluation, while other networks have been implicated in motor planning and initiation. What remains unknown is the circuit through which evaluation directs selective motor activation. Defining this link is essential to understand decision making, and this project will investigate natural social behaviors in a new animal model of decision making to reveal how the nervous system forges that link between perception and action. An improved understanding of decision making and social behavior will advance many fields including neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Furthermore, this research will also guide understanding of how decision making can go awry, yielding the promise of mechanistically-targeted treatments for behavioral pathologies such as compulsive behavior and addictive relapse. Such advances will vastly improve not only quality of life but also national economic competitiveness. This broadly relevant and appealing research will be integrated with the educational goal of engaging high-school students and teachers in laboratory research, developing the next generation of professional scientists, and communicating these and other findings to the public through an educational series of relaxed and informal Science Cafes. In female songbirds studied in this project, songs that they hear performed by males are the most important factor influencing the female's mate choice. A female's preference for a specific song and the behavioral indicators of that preference are easily quantifiable and consistent over time, providing a context in which to investigate how the brain encodes preference and uses that information to direct selective expression of behavioral responses. In these experiments, the researchers will (Aim 1) identify how subjective value of male song is encoded in specific populations of neurons in the female brain. Additional experiments will (Aim 2) identify circuits through which sensory processing of subjective value directs motor behavior. In those experiments, focally applied, low-intensity light will be used to activate or inactivate those circuits to discern the causal relation between activity in those pathways and performance of specific behavioral responses. Together, these experiments will reveal the link between perception and action.