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SFB 779:  Neurobiology of Motivated Behaviour

Subject Area Medicine
Term from 2008 to 2019
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 36555331
 
Final Report Year 2021

Final Report Abstract

Motivation is a fundamental determining factor of all goal-oriented behaviour and decision-making in higher animals and humans. Motivation, therefore, is not only an important concept for fundamental research aimed at unravelling the causal basis of behaviour, but is also of highest societal relevance as motivational factors determine the thriving of individuals in the contexts of their private and professional lives, and pathological disturbance of motivational control is at the basis of a significant number of neuropsychiatric diseases. Interestingly, while theories of the nature of motivation have a century-long history in psychology and the social sciences, the systematic exploration of brain mechanisms underlying motivation has begun only relatively recently. Moreover, several different concepts for the nature of motivation and its neuronal basis exist in the literature. The scientific approach taken by the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 779 "Neurobiology of motivated behaviour" was to focus on processes of decision-making and its adaptation in the context of learning scenarios. This approach allowed a convergent research program based on both animal research and human research and the full exploitation of the complementary advantages of both, historically separated, research traditions. In an additional related strategic decision, the Collaborative Research Centre has implemented a central behavioural paradigm (the "Integrative Paradigm of the CRC") that allowed researchers from traditionally separated methodological fields, including molecular and cellular neuroscience, circuit and systems neuroscience, and whole-brain imaging, to collaborate on the same experiment. These two strategic decisions proved pivotal for the mutual fostering of research impact in each of the individual fields and a multiplicative effect of the research impact for the consortium as a whole. Based on these strategic decisions, over its three funding periods, the CRC has significantly improved our understanding of the neural basis of motivational control of behaviour. An early focus of the research was on the integration of sensory and affective neuronal processing in the brain. Both, animal and corresponding human research, have provided a deep understanding not only about how sensory information is integrated in motivational control, but also about how sensory processes themselves are already affected by motivational processes. It has been a general feature of the CRC's collaborative work that such new insights were typically associated with a very broad basis linking results from several levels of description, ranging from the molecular/cellular levels, via the circuit and network levels to the level of whole-brain neuroimaging. After the early focus on the sensory-valence relationship, the CRC has then investigated the action-valence relationship, again by carefully designing suitable experiments in animals and humans. The corresponding results have pointed to an unexpectedly high impact of precise timing relationships between local neuronal signals for determining global aspects of behavioural control. These results have paved the way for a new research area that is currently developed in Magdeburg. As a further development, the results on the neural bases of motivational aspects of decision-making and their modulation by cognitive state, age or disease, are currently generalized to acknowledge that cognitive functions in general are based on neural resources that are limited and vulnerable. These insights and developments have now paved the way for a new CRC initiative, currently pursued in Magdeburg, investigating the nature of these resources and interventional strategies to recruit them.

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