Neural Control of Economic Decision-making

Michael Nitabach (Yale)

To navigate complex natural environments containing both dangerous and valuable items, animals must make economic decisions on the basis of information transduced by multiple senses. However, underlying neural mechanisms of multisensory decision making remain poorly understood. We have employed C. elegans as an experimentally tractable model organism for addressing this question, thereby revealing the neural architecture of state-dependent multisensory threat-reward decision making.