Biology

Dr. Arjun Ramakrishnan
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Sensitivity to reward is a fundamental mechanism that allows living organisms to navigate in an ever-changing environment. Severe changes in reward sensitivity has been, in fact, associated with many mental health conditions like depression and bipolar disorder. To understand how reward - be it in the form of food or social stimuli - influences action planning  and decision making, I have looked  at the representation of reward in sensorimotor brain areas of non-human primates. These studies for the first time revealed neurons that co-represent reward expectation along with movement kinematics in their activity, implicating primary motor areas in reward-based learning mechanisms. Considering the paramount role of reward in influencing our actions, I have recently developed an ecologically relevant, mathematically tractable, explore-exploit decision-making paradigm. By deploying the task in conjunction with various non-invasive measures like EEG, pupillometry and blink rate, I hope to establish neural biomarkers for depression and other mental health conditions.