Dr. Jeff Pettibone, assistant professor of psychology at Finlandia University, will present his lecture, “Dopamine Dynamics in Adaptive Decision Making,” on Friday, October 29, 2021, at 4:00 p.m., in Meese 109. The lecture is presented by the Human-Centered Computing research group of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems.
Abstract: Adaptive decision-making relies on a distributed network of neural substrates that learn associations between behaviors and outcomes to ultimately shape and direct future behavior. These substrates are organized in a system of cortical-striatal loops that are hypothesized to offer unique contributions to motivated behavior. Midbrain dopamine neurons strongly innervate these regions, however the consequences of dopamine fluctuations at these targets remain largely unresolved despite aggressive interrogation. Some experiments have highlighted dopamine’s role in learning via reward prediction errors (RPEs), while others have noted the importance of dopamine in signaling distinct aspects of motivation. The data presented will describe the precise role of dopamine in shaping decision-making during a stochastically rewarded trial-and-error task in rats.
Dr. Jeff Pettibone received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Bio-Psychology and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.