Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)

Reward expectations – one’s prediction about the likelihood of future outcomes - play a central role in shaping the satisfaction derived from those outcomes. Most existing research treats expectations as static, assuming they remain fixed in time. However, real-life expectations are often dynamic, fluctuating as new information becomes available. For example, during a soccer game, your expectations of seeing your team winning will likely rise and fall as the game unfolds. In the main part of this talk, I will present a series of studies demonstrating that human expectations can be tracked at s

Psychedelics like psilocybin and ketamine have shown great potential in treating psychiatric disorders, often producing long-lasting effects after a single dose, yet their underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Since one of the most consistent features of the psychedelic experience is the alteration in perception, this study aimed to investigate how acute doses of psychedelics influence perceptual integration. We used a free-response perceptual integration task in mice, alongside brain-wide mapping of drug-responsive populations using activity-dependent gene expression and calc

…prefrontal brain regions including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), as well as the anterior insula are critical for value computation and decision-making. However, how these brain regions encode and transfer computed values to resolve the exploration-exploitation dilemma still remains unknown. We studied human cogni