# Perturbations and Behavior

> **NIH NIH U19** · PRINCETON UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $376,588

## Abstract

Project Summary: Project 1, Perturbations and Behavior 
 
Working memory, the ability to temporarily hold multiple pieces of information in mind for manipulation, is 
central to virtually all cognitive abilities. This multi-component research project aims to comprehensively 
dissect the neural circuit mechanisms of this ability across multiple brain areas. The individual parts of the 
project cohere conceptually, in part, because they all involve rodents trained to perform a type of 
decision-making task that is based on the gradual accumulation of sensory evidence and thus relies on 
working memory. Neural correlates of working memory and decision-making are distributed across a very 
wide range of cortical and subcortical regions, but a complete listing of which of these regions actually cause 
these processes—and most importantly, what the nature of their contribution might be—remains out of reach. 
A significant obstacle has been that these processes can evolve rapidly (for example, going from loading an 
item into working memory, to holding it in memory, to retrieving it) and it is only recently that inactivation tools, 
such as inhibitory optogenetic molecules, could be turned on and off fast enough to distinguish between 
different phases. This project will use optogenetic inactivation in combination with this set of closely related 
working memory and decision-making tasks for the head-fixed rodent. The tasks are amenable to highly 
quantitative behavioral analysis. These features will allow a systematic and comprehensive quantitative probe 
of the causal contribution to working memory and decision-making of a very large set of regions across the 
dorsal cortex, deeper cortices, and targeted subcortical regions, including the cerebellum, the ventral 
tegmental area, the hippocampus, and the striatum. Other experiments will study the causal contributions of 
different genetically defined cell types, in targeted brain regions. Taken together, these experiments are 
expected to provide detailed information about how the interaction of particular neurons in the brain produces 
working memory and decisions, increasing knowledge about the brain basis of cognition.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10247575
- **Project number:** 5U19NS104648-05
- **Recipient organization:** PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Carlos D Brody
- **Activity code:** U19 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $376,588
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-09-28 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10247575

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10247575, Perturbations and Behavior (5U19NS104648-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10247575. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*