Naturalistic and translational decision making assays

Decision making is a crucial aspect of everyday life for all animals. From lower-level perceptual and perceptuo-motor guided decisions about whether and when to cross a road (humans) or choosing an escape or foraging path (animals) to higher-level decisions about selecting a suitable habitat (animals) or buying a house (humans).
While some decisions are only relevant for humans (e.g. buying a house) many others are common to different mammalian species (e.g. choosing on the best course of action to avoid immediate threats or navigate an unfamiliar environment). Such decisions are likely to be similarly affected by internal states such as anxiety and stress and personality traits such as cognitive flexibility and tendency towards addiction.
Understanding human DM and, in particular, how factors such as stress and/or clinical disorders might impact upon DM is critical. To fully understand mechanisms of DM in human requires us to consider both behaviour and how this links to the neuronal substrates that drive this behaviour. Revealing the detailed neuronal substrate can only be achieved in experimental animals in which recording and manipulation of specific neuronal circuitry can be performed. A key challenge then is to establish appropriate behavioural assays that can be reliably translated between humans and rodents.
In this project we will develop a range of principled decision-making tasks that are comparable for animals and humans. Human tasks will take advantage of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies available in the Virtual Reality Research (VR2) Facility at the University of Manchester (https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/VR2/). VR enables us to place the human in a virtual real-world DM tasks while retaining control of key experimental variables. In addition in VR it is possible to impose realistic stressors on the human to mimic equivalent tasks in rodents. Rodent tasks will be performed in real physical environments adapted to match parameters of the human tasks. We anticipate that the findings from this project will be important for laying down a testbed of paradigms for future investigation of neural substrates of DM and eventually developing neural-based models of altered decision making (e.g. in addiction) to underpin novel treatments.

This work fits within the BBSRC's Theme: Advancing the Frontiers of Bioscience Discovery under the Understanding the Rules of Life subheading. We will be addressing basic questions regarding the nature of choice in both humans and rodents. In addition, the research has the potential to underpin future research within the strategic challenge: Bioscience for an Integrated Understanding of Health. Understanding the mechanisms of choice (both cognitive, perceptual and perceptuo-motor) has implications for individuals and clinical groups in which such processes are altered (e.g. in addiction). This work is necessary to enable us to develop neural models of altered decision making in such groups and may underpin future treatments for these conditions.

This project will benefit from an in vivo skills supplement to enable us to understand behaviour and motor strategies (via visuo-motor and head/body and eye movement). These will be measured during free movement to determine which part of the visual environment is captured by animal retinae. Achieving this will enable to understand how rodents position their eyes to detect salient visual stimuli (e.g. an approaching predator), how they coordinate eye movements with spontaneous behaviours such as locomotion and rearing and how such motor decisions are driven by parameters of the environment. Under the in vivo training component the student will develop skills in:
Chronic implantation of miniature cameras for tracking eye movements in freely moving animals
Behavioural tests of visually guided behaviours paired with recordings of eye and head/body movements