Behavioral and neurophysiological responses to food- and drug-associated stimuli
The overall research goal of my laboratory is to determine the precise role of the brain’s reward circuitry in appetitive learning and drug addiction, and how motivated behavior is controlled by reward‐associated stimuli (“cues”). To this end, my laboratory specializes in behavioral and in vivo neurophysiological techniques to study neural connections within reward‐related brain areas. Further, I am interested in how individual differences in the ability of cues to control motivated behavior are reflected by neural activity within this circuitry (specifically the ventral basal ganglia), and how genetic and environmental factors interact to influence the magnitude of these differences.