Aurore San-Galli (PhD)

Work in MBB:

I am currently working as a post-doc in the MBB team with S. Bouret. We investigate the recruitment of energetic resources in motivation. How does the brain modulate internal physiological states in order to promote an action, as a function of the expected reward and physical effort? We develop a set of tasks in monkeys and we measure several behavioural and vegetative responses. We hypothesize that activity within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex regulates the effects of both reward and effort on the interaction between physiological states and behaviour. We record neuronal activity (multi-site single unit recordings) in this brain area in behaving monkeys.

Previous research:

My doctoral work focused on animal associative learning, as I studied behavioural and neurobiological features of retrospective revaluation in rats. The retrospective revaluation task has been mostly used in human subjects to study the foundations of causal reasoning and contingency judgment. This phenomenon consists in updating the causal or predictive status of an absent stimulus, based on information about another event that was previously associated with it. My PhD work aimed to design a behavioural task identifying such process in rodents, and to further describe its neurobiological basis (which are poorly understood, even in humans). We demonstrated the involvement of a prefronto-striatal circuit in retrospective revaluation in animals.

Publication:

Assessing value representations in animals. San-Galli A., Bouret S. J Physiol Paris 2014 doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2014.07.003

Retrospective revaluation and its neural circuit in rats. San-Galli A, Marchand AR, Decorte L, Di Scala G. Behav Brain Res. 2011 Oct;223(2):262-70

Main interests & expertise:

Motivation, decision making, experimental psychology, contingency judgements & associative learning models, animal behaviour, animal social cognition.

Education: PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Bordeaux (2010).