# Amygdala-cortical Circuitry in Reward Encoding, Expectation, and Decision Making

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2022 · $29,052

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Growing evidence suggests that the cognitive symptoms underlying many psychiatric disorders, including
addiction, result from a failure to appropriately learn about and/or anticipate potential future events. Indeed,
deficits in the prospective consideration of potential rewarding events have been detected in patients diagnosed
with addiction, accounting for their inability to limit use despite deleterious consequences. Similar deficits have
been identified in patients diagnosed with mental illnesses comorbid with addiction, such as depression, anxiety,
and schizophrenia. These mental illnesses are major intractable public health problems in the US, accounting
for hundreds of billions of dollars in costs associated with health care, crime, incarceration and law enforcement.
Effective approaches to prevent and/or treat these conditions are, therefore, badly needed. The goal of this
research is to expose the neural circuits required to learn predictive relationships and to use this information to
generate expectations about the future, in order to gain insight into how pathological states arise and determine
what can be done to combat them.
 Addictive substances are thought to hijack the brain systems that normally support adaptive decision making,
resulting in maladaptive choices. Adaptive decision making requires accurate prospective consideration of
possible future events. Prior encoding of specific stimulus-reward associative memories enables this prospective
consideration by allowing the mental simulation (i.e., representation) of possible future rewarding events. Recent
studies in rodents and humans have indicated that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) might be a brain region
crucial for learning these associations, but precisely how and the neural circuitry through which it achives this
function are unknown. The proposed research provides a critical, in-depth, and hypothesis-driven investigation
of the contribution of the BLA and its reciprocal connections with the orbitofrontal cortex, a region implicated in
decision making, to stimulus-reward encoding and subsequent retrieval of this information to guide adaptive
behavior and choice. This will be achieved through a multi-faceted and integrative neural recording and
manipulation approach. We will combine projection-specific activity monitoring, tag and capture techniques for
manipulation of specific event-activated neuronal ensembles, and behavioral procedures with translational
relevance to symptoms of human mental illness to uncover the function of amgydala-cortical loops in adaptive
reward-guided behavior and decision making.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10552191
- **Project number:** 3R01DA035443-09S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Kate M Wassum
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $29,052
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2019-02-15 → 2023-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10552191

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10552191, Amygdala-cortical Circuitry in Reward Encoding, Expectation, and Decision Making (3R01DA035443-09S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10552191. Licensed CC0.

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