Peter Rudebeck
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Neuroscience
Learning which things in the world predict rewards is basic to adaptive behavior. When this kind of emotional, or affective, learning goes wrong, it is central to nearly every psychiatric disorder, including depression and anxiety.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Computer Science
- Topics
affective learning
reward learning
probabilistic learning
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Determine how bottom-up influences on learning change single-neuron activity and communication between the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala, by recording neurons in macaques performing a probabilistic stimulus-reward task.
- Determine how top-down influences on learning act on the same prefrontal-amygdala circuit, including connected orbital prefrontal cortex and striatum, and whether they use different pathways from bottom-up influences.
- Measure interactions between brain areas during learning using recurrent neural network models and coherence, a measure of how closely the rhythms of two brain regions move together.
- Test whether pathways between the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are causally needed for altered learning, using chemogenetic tools that switch off selected circuits.
More about the research
Brain circuits linking the frontal cortex, the striatum and the amygdala, a deep brain region involved in emotion, support this learning. Much less is known about what happens in these circuits when learning is boosted or weakened by psychological factors. These can be bottom-up, driven by the stimuli themselves, or top-down, driven by goals and expectations.
Why it matters
Many psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety, involve learning that has gone awry. Identifying the specific neural activity patterns and brain pathways that change when learning is altered could help identify biomarkers for these disorders. It could also guide therapies for people whose ability to learn about rewards is disrupted.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Joshua I Gold
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Develop and test a mathematical theory of adaptive decision bounds that update during deliberation, using behavioral experiments in humans and combined behavioral and neural studies in monkeys making decisions under changing conditions.
John O'Doherty
California Institute of Technology, CA·Neuroscience
Separate occasion-related noise, meaningful state changes and stable trait differences in computational parameters by administering a computational assessment battery repeatedly over one year online and fitting hierarchical Bayesian models.
Tirin Moore
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Identify which lateral prefrontal neuron subpopulations control attention by recording with Neuropixels probes in the frontal eye field and area 46 of monkeys and using real-time decoders to trigger stimulus perturbations.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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