Neural Basis of Decisions
Our laboratory investigates the neural mechanisms underlying animal decision-making in uncertain environments.
Overview
The overarching goal of Kvitsiani lab is to understand what rules animals follow when making decisions in uncertain environments. Understanding these rules enables us to connect the activities and functions of particular brain regions to behavioral outcomes.
Duda Kvitsiani, PhD Primary Investigator
Research Focus
We seek to gain insight into the algorithms and neural mechanisms that animals employ in their decision-making processes. We use psychophysics motivated decision-making tasks that allow us to manipulate on a trial-by-trial basis the statistical features of the environment. The data that we collect from behaving animals allows us to build predictive and generative computational models. These models compress the data into a few parametrized equations that provide insights into the algorithmic nature of decisions, and they give us the roadmap for the interpretation of the neural signals. To understand how neural responses supports decisions we monitor the neural signal using extracellular electrophysiological and optical recordings from behaving mice. We use optogenetics in combination of neural recordings and mouse Cre recombinase lines to electrophysiologically “tag” different cell-types in cortex. We are particularly interested in how diversity of inhibitory neurons in mammalian cortex shapes the neural dynamics of the major excitatory neurons.
Publications
Lab Team
Lahiru Ekanayake - lahiru.ekanayake@siu.edu
Weerasekara Mudiyanselage Janaka - janakamwm@siu.edu
