Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Decoding The Neural Circuitry Of Reward Behavior, Ernesto H. Bedoy, James M. Hyman

McNair Poster Presentations

Classical conditioning demonstrates that rewards can be used to train behavior by pairing a stimulus, known as a prompt, with reinforced behavior. At a neuronal level, this association strengthens the connections between the neurons involved, making communication easier the next time. Enhanced communication is identified with learning, allowing an organism to anticipate a reward with a prompt so that it can perform the desired behavior to successfully obtain the reward (Noonan et al., 2011). In this study, we created a computational model to represent a neural circuit with synaptic plasticity during reward, no-reward and anticipation states. Our results confirmed our …