The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded a Project Grant totaling $827,454 to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242). The grant, awarded on July 1, 2024, will support research to characterize the neuroeconomic mechanisms underlying counterfactual thinking and regret processing in the brain.
The key objectives are to: 1) Determine how populations of functionally distinct neurons in the nucleus accumbens, defined by their upstream inputs, encode hypothetical value and assign credit to unselected actions; and 2) Establish a link between activity in specific afferent pathways to the nucleus accumbens and action-specific forms of counterfactual thinking. The research will utilize novel approaches in rodent neuroeconomics, brain-wide imaging, and circuit-dissection technologies to advance understanding of these fundamental neural computations. Findings have the potential to refine diagnostic approaches and develop circuit-based treatments for psychiatric disorders involving emotion-cognition interactions.
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