# Accumbal Activity Contouring Underlying Cue-Directed Reward Seeking

> **NIH NIH F31** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2021 · $46,036

## Abstract

Project Abstract/Summary
Both drugs of abuse and necessities for life—food, socialization, procreation—recruit the
evolutionarily conserved circuitry of the basal ganglia in order to integrate contextual information
and facilitate action selection. Critical to this is the acquisition of associative relations between
contextual reinforcement predictors and reinforcers themselves. While the spiny projection
neurons (SPNs) of the ventral striatum are known to be important integrators of sensory
information and learned reward salience through dopamine input, their encoding of learned cue-
to-reward behavioral sequencing remains unknown. Previous studies have fundamentally
disagreed with respect to the roles of the two primary populations of SPNs (dopamine receptor
D1- and D2-expressing SPNs) as they pertain to reinforcement, perhaps because they have
largely relied on long-term systemic disruption of population activity rather than temporally defined
activity contours. My preliminary results point to a selective role of D2-SPNs in encoding
reinforcement-predictive contextual cues, which I hypothesize then give way to D1-SPN activity
underlying the initiation of motor programs to acquire reinforcers. I will first characterize the
subsecond dynamics of D1/D2-SPN activity during cue-directed reinforcement behavior using
calcium-sensor based fluorometric techniques, and investigate the predictivity of population
neural activity on behavioral performance. Then, through spatiotemporally-restricted modulation
of D2-SPN activity using optogenetics, I will determine the necessary resolution of cue-locked D2-
SPN activity for cue-directed behavior.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10153266
- **Project number:** 1F31DA052185-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Avery McGuirt
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $46,036
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-07-01 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10153266

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10153266, Accumbal Activity Contouring Underlying Cue-Directed Reward Seeking (1F31DA052185-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10153266. Licensed CC0.

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