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The long-term goal of the Laubach Lab is to understand the role of the frontal cortex and the basal ganglia in goal-directed behavior.
Currently, we are carrying out three lines of research on the neuronal basis of behavioral strategies that enable effective food-seeking behavior, or foraging. First, we are studying how we anticipate food-predictive stimuli and control our actions to optimize food collection. Second, we are studying how we learn the values of stimuli in the environment and flexibly track stimulus value under changing environmental circumstances. Third, we are studying how working memory is used to link together sequences of actions that lead to the collection of food. To study these issues, we use multi-electrode recording methods in awake, behaving rodents. We also use reversible inactivations, local drug infusions, and tract-tracing methods and are active in developing methods for quantifying how neuronal spike trains and population activity represent information about behavior and how spike trains relate to ongoing oscillations of local field potentials.
Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health and we are a core group in the Swartz Initiative for Theoretical and Systems Neuroscience at Yale. |
Top-Down Control of Action by
Medial Frontal Cortex
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