Dr Campbell Le Heron - New Zealand Brain Research Institute, NZ : "Reward, effort and dopamine - unravelling the mechanisms that underlie loss of motivation in brain disorders."
Speaker: Dr Campbell Le Heron
New Zealand Brain Research Institute
NZ
Title: Reward, effort and dopamine - unravelling the mechanisms that underlie loss of motivation in brain disorders.
Abstract: Loss of motivation – apathy – is a disabling and common accompaniment of many neurological and psychiatric brain disorders. Evolving understanding of normal goal directed behaviour, across species, provides a mechanistic framework within which to understand these behavioural alterations in our patients. At its core, goal directed behaviour involves integration of the rewarding outcomes of potential actions towards goals with the costs of making these actions. This process, often referred to as effort-based decision making (EBDM), is instantiated neurally in the same regions where disruption is associated with the clinical occurrence of apathy. But EBDM has many components – with differing neurobiological substrates – that when disrupted could lead to a common phenotype of reduced motivated behaviour. This talk reviews our work elucidating the mechanisms that underlie apathy in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and cerebral small vessel disease, using neuroimaging, physiological recordings and tasks that dissociate the effects of changing reward, effort and dopamine on behaviour.
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