Grant: Project Grant

In our everyday lives, we are constantly faced with choices, from choosing what to eat to deciding which route to take to work. Making these decisions involves understanding and weighing different options against each other. Scientists believe that a part of our brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays an important role in the decision process by pulling together information about the various aspects of the differing options, such as what type of food we are in the mood for to which restaurants we prefer. Substance use disorders (SUDs), disorders in which individuals have inability to control their use of addictive substances, lead to changes in activity within the OFC which impacts the ability to make reasonable and well-informed decisions. This research proposal aims to understand how the decision process is impacted in SUDs. To accomplish, this we will first reveal how the OFC combines different pieces of information, such as food preference, nutrition, hunger, and quantity of food, to make decisions; and second, to determine how this process is impacted in subjects with prior drug use. We plan to study this process by observing rats as they make choices between different food options in a specially designed decision-making task. By recording brain activity in the OFC while the rats make these choices, we can see how different features of the food options are represented and combined in the brain and how these representations are changed following substance use. To further understand how OFC receives information important for making decisions, we will use a technique called optogenetics, which will permit the ability to temporarily turn off certain inputs to the OFC, allowing us to determine how other brain regions influence the decision-making processes occurring in the OFC. This research will give us valuable insights into how the brain's decision-making process is affected in SUDs, with the potential to open new avenues for treating substance use.