Learning │ Motivation │Decision-Making
MISSION
The Keiflin Lab investigates the mechanisms underlying reward-guided decision-making, both in adaptive and maladaptive conditions.
Our goal is to define how animals learn to predict rewards, how they learn to execute specific actions to obtain those rewards, and how these reward-seeking actions are flexibly regulated in response to changing contextual demands.
We seek to answer these questions at the psychological, computational, and neural levels of analysis.
APPROACH
“Nothing in neurobiology makes sense —except in the light of behavior”
We believe that to understand how the brain makes decisions, we need to know what goes into the making of a decision —what cognitive/computational operations are carried out by the decision-maker.
For this reason, our lab places strong emphasis on the rigorous characterization of behavior.
Drawing on formal theories of associative learning and decision-making, we design well-controlled behavioral paradigms that constrain and isolate specific cognitive/computational processes.
We integrate this behavioral approach with a range of neuroscience tools to monitor and manipulate neural activity in defined neural circuits in-vivo (e.g. optogenetics, chemogenetics, fiberphotometry).
This approach allows us to uncover the neurocircuit mechanims underlying reward-guided decision-making, and how they may breakdown in neuropsychiatric disorders.
VALUES
Artwork by Sammy Katta