Association for Behavior Analysis International

The experience of a reward, such as the ingestion of food, is accompanied by dynamic patterns of neuronal activity across many brain regions. For example, reward ingestion is often accompanied by brief increases in spike activity of dopamine neurons, as well as other neural populations in the basal ganglia. I will discuss animal laboratory studies that illustrate the important role of behavioral approaches in revealing the functions of this reward-elicited activity with a focus on reward signals that promote future reward seeking behavior.

Intermediate - should have understanding of reinforcement and familiarity with general related brain activity.

Patricia Janak is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Neuroscience in the School of Medicine. Dr. Janak earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health. From 1999 to 2014, Dr. Janak was faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was the Howard J. Weinberger, M.D., Endowed Chair in Addiction Research at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Janak has served as Program Chair and Secretary for the Society for Neuroscience and is editor-in-chief for the journal, Psychopharmacology. Dr. Janak studies neural processes of reward learning, both under normal conditions and in animal models relevant to substance use disorders.  Janak and her laboratory members have made critical discoveries regarding the neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases of alcohol intake and relapse. Current work focuses on circuit level analysis of striatal systems and dopamine error signals during learning and decision making.