A Snapshot seminar hosted by the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience
Motivational deficits are a common symptom shared across multiple neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Much of our understanding of motivated behaviour derives from preclinical behavioural tasks that utilize physiological restriction (food, water) in relatively simplistic environments to induce robust behavioural response. While this has been valuable in contributing to our understanding of the underlying neurobiology of motivation, it is unclear how well behavioural findings derived from such tasks relate to human behaviour. Animals monitored in more naturalistic environments may display more ethologically-relevant behaviours of translational value, particularly in the context of drug discovery. In this talk I will present our work developing a non-appetitive forage-based motivation task alongside the use of an operant-based effort-based decision making task to assess the effect of clinically-used compounds on motivational state.