Symposium
Under Pressure:
Neural Mechanisms of Conflict and Action Selection
Chair
Camila Zold
Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET, Instituto de Fisiología y Biofísica Bernardo Houssay, Grupo de Neurociencia de Sistemas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Co-Chair
Salvatore Lecca
University of Lausanne, Department of Fundamental Neurosciences, Lausanne, Switzerland
Adaptive behavior requires organisms to resolve conflicts between competing drives and to translate decisions into appropriate, goal-directed actions. Understanding how the brain integrates emotional evaluation, decision-making strategies and motor circuit function is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience, with implications for fields ranging from learning and motivation to neuropsychiatric disorders and rehabilitation. This symposium brings together four internationally recognized groups to provide complementary, state-of-the-art perspectives on these questions, using techniques that monitor and manipulate neural activity during behaviorally relevant paradigms. The first talk (Salvatore Lecca) examines how the lateral habenula integrates emotional and motivational signals during parental behavior under threat, in situations requiring the prioritization of caregiving over competing defensive responses. The second (Camila Zold) investigates how striatal circuits encode exploration–exploitation decision policies in foraging tasks, where animals continuously arbitrate between alternative behavioral strategies. The third (Nicolas Tritsch) characterizes how dopaminergic dynamics constrain the timing and vigor of actions, shaping how ongoing behavior is adjusted when multiple action demands compete. The fourth (Soledad Esposito) demonstrates how brainstem circuits contribute to the stabilization and consolidation of learned motor behaviors, biasing the retention of selected motor programs over competing alternatives. Together, these studies illustrate how affective evaluation, decision-making strategies, neuromodulatory control, and motor circuits interact to generate adaptive behavior. By bringing together these complementary approaches, the symposium provides a multi-level conceptual framework linking decision-making under conflict with the selection, modulation, and stabilization of adaptive actions. Featuring internationally recognized researchers from Europe, North America, and South America, this session fosters cross-disciplinary exchange, promotes the integration of complementary methodologies, and strengthens collaborations across research communities. It will be of interest to a wide audience of the Argentine neuroscience community, including researchers studying motivation, learning, decision-making, motor control, neuromodulation and neural plasticity, providing opportunities for dialogue and collaboration across experimental systems and conceptual approaches.
Salvatore Lecca
University of Lausanne, Department of Fundamental Neurosciences, Lausanne, Switzerland
Lateral habenula neuronal dynamics during parental decision
Parental care requires animals to prioritize offspring needs over competing environmental demands, including potential threats. How the brain supports this rapid decision-making between self-preservation and caregiving remains largely unknown. The lateral habenula (LHb), a key hub in negative affect processing, has recently been implicated in parental behavior. Previous work shows that LHb neurons respond both to aversive stimuli and to pup distress signals that trigger retrieval, suggesting a convergence of threat and caregiving signals within the same neuronal population.
Here, we investigate whether LHb activity also supports caregiving decisions under threat. Using a conflict-based behavioral paradigm in mother–father mouse dyads combined with LHb calcium imaging, we examine how aversive stimuli influence parental actions and how LHb neural dynamics reflect the balance between threat processing and infant care.
Camila Zold
Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET, Instituto de Fisiología y Biofísica Bernardo Houssay, Grupo de Neurociencia de Sistemas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Striatal circuits in exploration–exploitation decisions
In natural environments, animals must constantly balance the tradeoff between exploiting known resources and exploring novel options. How the brain integrates these factors to guide adaptive behavior remains largely unknown. Here, we trained mice in a virtual foraging task in which effort and reward contingencies can be systematically varied. As travel costs increased, animals shifted toward exploitation, exhibiting greater persistence and reduced exploration. At the neural level, single neurons in the dorsomedial striatum encoded multiple task-relevant events, including reward delivery, reward omission, and spatial transitions. Together, these findings suggest that striatal circuits represent key variables underlying adaptive behavior and provide a framework to investigate how other striatal regions contribute to decision-making under more complex conditions.
Nicolas Tritsch
McGill University
Defining the timescales of neuromodulation by dopamine
Dopamine is critical for motor control and reinforcement learning, but the precise molecular mechanisms and timescales of neuromodulation are less clear. In this presentation, I will describe our attempts at better understanding how dopamine contributes to behavior through the study of release patterns and optogenetic manipulations. I will first describe published work highlighting the dynamics of dopamine release in the striatum of mice and their relationship to concurrent fluctuations in another important striatal modulator acetylcholine. I will then share unpublished work taking a critical look at the widely-held view that phasic fluctuations in extracellular dopamine control the vigor of ongoing movements. Our findings help restrain the kinds of mechanisms and timescales that dopamine likely acts on to modify behavior.
María Soledad Espósito
Laboratorio de Neurobiología del Movimiento, Centro Atómico Bariloche, CNEA-CONICET
Brainstem circuits gate motor memory consolidation
Motor memory consolidation is traditionally assigned to cortical and subcortical circuits, with the brainstem viewed as a passive executor of motor behaviors. Here, we identify glutamatergic neurons in the mesencephalic locomotor region (MLR) as essential for motor memory consolidation, as their inhibition selectively impairs retention in rotarod and skilled reaching tasks. These findings establish the MLR as a brainstem hub that gates the stabilization of learned motor skills.