| | Principal Investigators
| Bruno Averbeck, Ph.D. |
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Dr. Averbeck attained a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1994. After working 3 years in industry, Dr. Averbeck returned to the University of Minnesota and completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2001, working in the lab of Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos. His thesis was titled, "Neural Mechanisms of Copying Geometrical Shapes". Following his thesis work, Dr. Averbeck carried out post-doctoral studies at the University of Rochester with Dr. Daeyeol Lee. During this period he studied neural mechanisms underlying sequential learning, coding of vocalizations and population coding. In 2006 Dr. Averbeck moved to University College London as a senior Lecturer, where he began experiments looking at the role of frontal-striatal circuits in learning, combining neurophysiology, brain imaging and patient studies. In 2009, Dr. Averbeck moved to the NIMH and established the Unit on Learning and Decision Making in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology. |
| Research Interests |
| The work in Dr. Averbeck’s group focuses on understanding the role of frontal-striatal circuits, and particularly the role of dopamine in these circuits, on learning and the representation of beliefs. The lab pursues these questions by establishing direct links between microcircuit network dynamics and behaviour. At the level of the microcircuit, the group looks at the effects of dopamine depletion on network dynamics within the basal ganglia (BG). These studies use information theoretic tools to assess the information processing capacity of the BG network in dopamine lesioned and control rats. Moving towards behaviour, the group examines the effects of micro-injections of dopamine antagonists into lateral prefrontal cortex and the caudate nucleus on behaviour and network neural activity, in the behaving monkey. At the behavioural level studies in patients with Parkinson’s disease and
schizophrenia also examine the impact of pathological dopamine signalling on behaviour. By using a vertically integrated approach the lab defines the behavioural impact of changes in dopamine signalling through patient studies and brain imaging and then focuses on these specific behavioural processes and their associated brain systems with the in-vivo work, which allows the examination and manipulation of the system at a high level of detail. |
| Representative Selected Recent Publications: |
- Cruz, A.V., Mallet, N., Magill, P., Brown, P., and Averbeck, B. B.: Effects of dopamine depletion on network entropy in the external globus pallidus. J Neurophys., 102:1092-1102, 2009.
- Averbeck, B. B. and Duchaine, B.: Integration of social and utilitarian factors in decision making, Emotion, :599-608, 2009.
- Eusebio, A., Pogosyan, A., Wang, S., Averbeck, B., Doyle Gaynor, L., Limousin, P., Hariz, M., and Brown, P.: Resonance in the Cortical Response to Basal Ganglia Output in Parkinson’s Disease. Brain, 132:2139-2150, 2009.
- Averbeck, B. B. and Seo, M.: The statistical neuroanatomy of frontal networks in the macaque. PLOS Computational Biology, 4:e1000050, 2008.
- Averbeck, B. B. and Lee, D.: Prefrontal neural correlates of memory for sequences. J Neurosci., 27:2204-2211, 2007.
- Averbeck, B. B. and Romanski L.M.: Probabilistic encoding of vocalizations in macaque ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. J Neurosci., 26:11023-11033, 2006.
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