Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida 

Research

Curiosity

Animals and humans are often faced with unknown stimuli, which can invoke curiosity. What is the brain mechanism responsible? Novelty can simultaneously attract interest but also be scary. When faced with novelty, how do we decide whether to explore or to avoid? If we are too cautious, we may lose opportunities to learn new information. On the other hand, failing to avoid a potential threat may lead to life-threatening situations such as predation and explosion. How does the brain balance curiosity and fear? During development when babies are learning about the world around them (physical world or knowledge), what causes them to explore, and how does the brain determine the appropriate balance between curiosity and threat? Our lab is interested in addressing these unexplored questions behind curiosity, which is fundamental in learning and education.

Threat-coping

In natural environment, we continuously face situations that can lead to a potential reward, a potential threat, or both. For example, walking or driving on the road may be necessary for going to work but also contain risk of a traffic accident. In many situations, we must overcome fear of potential threats in order to attain a necessary reward. At its extremes, excess fear may cause maladaptive behaviors such as anxiety and PTSD. Our lab is interested in the neural and computational mechanisms driving how animals estimate, learn, and avoid potential threats at appropriate levels.

Development of dopamine systems

Our lab currently focuses on dopamine, a neurotransmitter known to send reward information in the brain. While dopamine is well known to promote reward learning, dopamine-related medication tends to have mixed effects. These mixed effects are partially explained by the diversity of dopamine neurons. We and others recently found that some dopamine neurons send information for non-rewarding events such as threat. For example, we recently identified a unique subpopulation of dopamine neurons that project to the most posterior part of the striatum (tail of the striatum or TS) promote threat avoidance, rather than promoting reward approach. We are currently studying the neural circuit and computational mechanism diverse dopamine neurons work together for appropriate decision-making, and how diverse dopamine systems are established during development.

List of Published Work 

NCBI list

Google Scholar

Talk video, materials and data

Talk video is posted at YouTube.

Original virus and DNAs are available at Addgene and UNC vector core.

Published data in our paper are available at Dryad.