Project description
Insight into mental travelling
Our brain has the intriguing capacity to imagine the possible outcomes of a decision before it is made. Information from several other brain regions about the emotional and cognitive significance of various stimuli is collected in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) region in the form of an internal map. This map emerges spontaneously without external guidance, and it is a part of the brain's internal decision-making process for future behaviour. Funded by the European Research Council, the MentalTravel project will study how the OFC's internal map is created and how it helps the brain reach a goal while avoiding obstacles. Understanding this process may offer new insights into the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders.
Objective
One of the most notable features of the brain is the ability to simulate possible consequences of a behavioural choice that has not even been experienced in the real world. While this ability is likely fundamental for our intelligence and creativity, its neural circuit basis is largely unclear. To tackle this problem, we will focus on the rat’s ability of spatial navigation, finding an optimal path to a remote destination that is located outside the range of sensory perception. This ability is thought to be supported by the brain’s internal map that allows an animal to estimate its future position followed by planned movements. While the hippocampal formation has been the primary focus of research on the brain’s spatial map, it mainly tracks an animal’s position and its nearby trajectories. By contrast, the brain has another internal map in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that points to an animal’s goal destination throughout navigation. Because this goal coding emerges autonomously in the network without relying on explicit external cues, it can be considered part of the brain’s inner reasoning process for future behaviours. Here we will explore how this internally-set goal can emerge in the OFC network through interactions with its associated regions – thalamus and neuromodulatory systems. We will then explore how this goal coding can be used to plan an optimal goal-directed path by avoiding known obstacles in the environment. Since this process likely requires the cooperation of two internal maps in OFC and the hippocampus, we will elucidate the underlying circuit mechanism that employs multiple map systems in parallel. We will take advantage of state-of-the-art experimental and analysis techniques to decipher neural codes for navigational simulations. The OFC and the hippocampus are the regions often affected by psychiatric disorders, and their role in inner reasoning may provide new insights into their pathophysiology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiologycognitive neuroscience
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinepsychiatry
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiologypathophysiology
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Host institution
80539 Munchen
Germany