Klavir Lab
Neural Circuits of Behavior
We are interested in the way behavior is controlled and executed by the brain circuitry. How does the brain choose one behavioral program over the other? and what drives it to do so? The basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits seems to be uniquely organized to channel the selection between competing options for behavioral control. We are interested in the way the information is carried by this system for adaptive choice of behavior, and what goes wrong in the system during maladaptive behaviors such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), obesity, addiction and other behavioral control disorders.
Behavioral-control disorders such as OCD could be conceptualized as manifested through disease defining experience such as a strong emotional activation which causes plasticity changes in the behavioral choice system. Moreover, emotions such as fear have been shown to exacerbate symptoms in such disorders. We are interested in the effect of the neural system underlying fear, including the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and their connections, on the behavioral choice system.
