Project description
Pharmaco-magnetoencephalography to address persistent behavioural variability
In a new city, the absence of available dining options can impact our decision-making process, leading to random choices or learning errors. Existing reward-guided learning theories often overlook this issue, while coping strategies typically involve adjusting exploration levels or learning processes. However, understanding these tactics requires looking beyond overt evidence-seeking actions to covert attentional sampling, a complex process primarily studied through eye-tracking methods, which may limit the comprehension of subtle nuances in covert sampling behaviours. The MSCA-funded DnReLU project proposes pharmaco-magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track attentional focus. This approach allows the research to address persistent behavioural variability across multiple scales, ranging from neurotransmitter dynamics to behaviour modelling grounded in biophysics.
Objective
Navigating a new city's dining scene often confronts us with unavailable options, e.g. 'fully booked,' shaping our behavioral variability such as random exploratory choices and learning errors. Existing theories of reward-guided learning typically overlook option unavailability. Hypothesized strategies may vary, from adjusting action stochasticityover-exploration to broadly check alternatives, or under-exploration to quickly latch onto available favoritesto adjusting learning process, e.g. weighing past choices for maximal future rewards, or heuristically inflating the value of busy venues while devaluating others ('busier = better'). A nuanced understanding of these tactics requires a deep dive into information sampling, encompassing not just overt evidence-seeking actions but also covert attentional sampling during value updates in the internal model of the world. These complex sampling patterns, unfolding rapidly over hundreds of milliseconds, have been chiefly studied through eye-tracking that captures overt oculomotor variables, leaving the subtleties of covert sampling unexplored and detailed mechanistic insights elusive. I aim to address this issue across multiple scalesfrom neurotransmitter and neural dynamics to biophysically-grounded modeling of behavior. Using pharmaco-magnetoencephalography (MEG), I will track covert attentional focus across the entire timespan of every single reward-guided decision during learning, in detailed source-localized brain regions, while also perturbing neurochemical systems to establish causal links. This research promises to illuminate longstanding questions, such as why behavioral variability persists despite evolutionary pressures favoring reward-maximizing decisions. The training through this MSCA in circuit-level mechanistic models, imparted by world-leading experts, will complement my existing expertise, and establish me as an independent researcher in the burgeoning field of cognitive computational neuroscience.
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.
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
75230 Paris
France