Neuroimaging of Habit-based vs. Goal-directed behavior in Instrumental Learning

Addiction has been proposed to result from an overreliance on the habit-based and goal-directed controllers of behavior; however, few data exist to simultaneously support both behavioral and neuoranatomical aspects of this theory in humans. Here, we clarify the locations of the homologous structures controlling behavior in the human brain to those studied in animal models. The study included two parts. 1) The first part established in a behavioral experiment that the devaluation video in the present paradigm was able to influence instrumental behavior. Using a 3-session instrumental learning task to examine behavior, we examined 78 participants, aged 18-35. A significant difference in the change in response rate immediately before and after devaluation was found between the 2 groups viewing worms in devaluation compared to the group not viewing worms. There was a significant difference in change in liking immediately before and after devaluation between the three conditions, as well as in the change in liking, hunger, and response rate between the paired and empty bowl unpaired conditions. There was a significant correlation between snack liking pre-session 3 and response rate in session 3, as well as between pre-extinction snack liking and response rate in the start of extinction. 2) The second part of the study used the same 3-session training paradigm over 3-days, with fMRI on the third day to measure neural activity during this same instrumental learning task. Although the results are preliminary (N=10), these show that the comparable regions of the human brain are involved in goal-directed and habit-based control of behavior, with a perfect negative Spearman correlation of mean vmPFC activity at the end of training and the change in responding from immediately before to immediately after devaluation. Three of the 10 subjects were addicted smokers, which is insufficient data to determine whether they were less sensitive to reward devaluation and whether they relied more heavily on brain structures associated with habit-based controllers of behavior. However, understanding the relationship between habit-based and goal-directed controllers of behavior and their role in addiction and clarifying the human brain structures responsible for these systems can lead to the development of therapies for addiction

Effect of Dirac Spinons on ARPES signatures of Herbertsmithe

The spinon continues to be an elusive elementary excitation of frustrated antiferromagnets. To solidify evidence for its existence, we address the question of what will be the Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) signatures of single crystal samples of Herbertsmithite assuming it is described by the Dirac spin liquid state. In particular, we show that the electron spectral function will have a linear in energy dependence near specific wave vectors and that this dependence is expected even after fluctuations to the mean field values are taken into account. Observation of this unique signature in ARPES will provide very strong evidence for the existence of spinons in greater than one dimension.Comment: 10 page

The Green's function for the radial Schramm-Loewner evolution

We prove the existence of the Green's function for radial SLE(k) for k<8. Unlike the chordal case where an explicit formula for the Green's function is known for all values of k<8, we give an explicit formula only for k=4. For other values of k, we give a formula in terms of an expectation with respect to SLE conditioned to go through a point.Comment: v1: 16 pages, 0 figure

Estimates of random walk exit probabilities and application to loop-erased random walk

We prove an estimate for the probability that a simple random walk in a simply connected subset A of Z^2 starting on the boundary exits A at another specified boundary point. The estimates are uniform over all domains of a given inradius. We apply these estimates to prove a conjecture of S. Fomin in 2001 concerning a relationship between crossing probabilities of loop-erased random walk and Brownian motion.Comment: 26 pages, 0 figure