Project Type(s):
Basic Science

Many psychiatric disorders involve an abnormality in movements, termed ‘psychomotor’
dysfunction, that reflects aberrant activity of the brain circuits producing behavior. Nevertheless,
psychomotor mechanisms remain poorly understood. One possible source of psychomotor dysfunction is alterations in neuromodulatory transmitters, such as norepinephrine (NE), which is broadcast throughout the brain from a small brainstem region called locus coeruleus (LC). LC-NE is implicated in psychiatric disorders including depression, PTSD, ADHD, and dementia, with behavioral neuroscience studies demonstrating roles in arousal and decision-making. LC-NE is often studied in psychiatry on the timescale of minutes to hours with a focus on NE drugs, leaving underexamined the precise temporal relationship between LC neural activity and discrete components of motivated behavior. This proposal aims to identify psychomotor functions of LC-NE in decision-making at the level of neural circuit activity in mice. We leverage powerful techniques to record LC neural activity with high spatiotemporal precision while simultaneously deploying advances in AI machine vision technology to quantify the mouse’s movements. By precisely quantifying movement patterns and LC-NE activity, we aim to characterize basic psychomotor functions related to cognition. In turn, our work will build a foundation for noninvasive, mechanistic biomarkers that enhance the diagnosis and management of psychiatric disorders.

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