Grant: Project Grant

Reducing or eliminating problem behaviours is a critical component to every-day healthy functioning and to the successful treatment of clinical conditions such as drug and food addiction or anxiety disorders. Reduction in unwanted behaviours can be achieved through extinction training. This training consists of the presentation of cues for biologically significant events in the absence of those events. In the laboratory this training is used to better understand the behavioural and neural mechanisms that regulate extinction learning and its diminutive effect on behavior. In the clinical setting, extinction-based therapies such as abstinence or cue exposure, are used to help patients eliminate behaviours that define their psychopathologies. However, the success of extinction-based training strongly depends on the generalizability of this learning to new contexts, across long temporal intervals or upon experience with motivationally or emotionally charged events. This proposal seeks to develop novel, long-lasting and generalizable behavioural routes via which reduction in unwanted behaviour can be achieved. This will be done using two distinct paradigms, which drive extinction learning via two ways: by manipulating outcome delivery (omission of an expected outcome) or by manipulating outcome expectation (generating an inflated expectation of an outcome). We will use these two paradigms to uncover the general or common neural mechanisms of this learning by studying how the brain processes extinction in a variety of settings real-time, and what neural circuits are causally involved in regulating this learning. Our ultimate goal is to use behaviour and neuroscience to develop novel routes that support lasting reduction of unwanted behavior from bench to beside.