Roles of Accumbal and Septal Circuitry in Stimulus-Induced Reinstatement of Cocaine Seeking

Chronic relapse is a tremendous obstacle in battling addiction. Animal models of relapse (e.g. reinstatement of extinguished lever pressing) are critical for uncovering the neural substrates of addiction. Understanding the neurocircuitry of relapse may provide potentially viable targets to reduce relapse rates and treat addiction. Elucidating the circuits involved in stimulus-induced reinstatement is of particular importance because drug-associated stimuli (e.g. discrete or contextual drug-associated cues) evoke drug craving and perpetuate drug seeking. Nucleus accumbens (NAc) and lateral septum (LS) are two subcortical structures known to contribute to drug addiction and relapse behaviors. However, NAc and LS afferents recruited during stimulus-induced reinstatement of extinguished cocaine seeking have not been fully characterized. Here, we used self-administration paradigms combined with retrograde tracers, Fos immunohistochemistry, pharmacology, and chemogenetics to elucidate NAc and LS afferents involved in stimulus-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking. In the first set of experiments, we found that neurons in the prelimbic cortex, basolateral amygdala, and ventral subiculum that project to NAc core, but not to NAc shell, showed enhanced neural activation during cue-induced reinstatement compared to extinguished cocaine seeking behavior. However, only activation of the prelimbic-NAc core pathway positively correlated with cocaine seeking behavior. Furthermore, activation of these circuits was specific to cocaine-, but not sucrose-seeking. In the second set of experiments, we found that dorsal hippocampus, LS, and dorsal hippocampal inputs to LS showed enhanced neural activation during context-induced compared to cue-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking. In support of these results, chemogenetic-mediated inhibition of the dorsal hippocampal-LS pathway attenuated context-, but not cue-induced reinstatement. However, pharmacological inhibition of LS attenuated both context- and cue-induced reinstatement. We then examined if ventral hippocampal neurons may drive cue-induced reinstatement via LS. We found that ventral hippocampal inputs to LS were activated during context- and cue-induced reinstatement, but chemogenetic-mediated inhibition of the circuit did not attenuate either reinstatement modality. Together these data elucidate multiple excitatory inputs to NAc or LS during stimulus-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking, and indicate distinct neural circuits mediating various reinstatement modalities. The results provide greater insight into the neurocircuitry of relapse that may lead to new therapeutics to treat drug addiction

Student Financial Literacy: Building it Back

Do you know how to build a financial literacy program from scratch, or take your current program to another level without impacting your departmental budget? Attend this session to learn how to build out a program for your entire campus. You’ll leave with a concrete plan for your institutions and a framework for running individual financial literacy sessions. This highly interactive session will have games, Kahoots, and polls, so come ready to learn in a fun environment where you will leave energized and ready to bring a dynamic student financial literacy program to your institution

Building school-based social capital through 'We Act - Together for Health' - a quasi-experimental study

Abstract Background Social capital has been found to be positively associated with various health and well-being outcomes amongst children. Less is known about how social capital may be generated and specifically in relation to children in the school setting. Drawing on the social cohesion approach and the democratic health educational methodology IVAC (Investigation – Vision – Action – Change) the aim of this study was to examine the effect of the Health Promoting School intervention ‘We Act – Together for Health’ on children’s cognitive social capital. Method A quasi-experimental controlled pre- and post-intervention study design was conducted with 548 participants (mean age 11.7 years). Cognitive social capital was measured as: horizontal social capital (trust and support in pupils); vertical social capital (trust and support in teachers); and a sense of belonging in the school using questions derived from the Health Behaviour in School Children study. A series of multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses was performed for each outcome to estimate the effect of the intervention. Result The analyses showed no overall significant effect from the intervention on horizontal social capital or vertical social capital at the six-month follow-up. A negative effect was found on the sense of belonging in the school. Gender and grade appeared to be important for horizontal social capital, while grade was important for sense of belonging in the school. The results are discussed in relation to We Act’s implementation process, our conceptual framework and methodological issues and can be used to direct future research in the field. Conclusion The study finds that child participation in health education can affect the children’s sense of belonging in the school, though without sufficient management support, this may have a negative effect. With low implementation fidelity regarding the Action and Change dimension of the intervention at both the school and class level, and with measurement issues regarding the concept of social capital, more research is needed to establish a firm conclusion on the importance of the children’s active participation as a source for cognitive social capital creation in the school setting. Trial registration https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN8520301

Neural evidence for Bayesian trial-by-trial adaptation on the N400 during semantic priming.

When semantic information is activated by a context prior to new bottom-up input (i.e. when a word is predicted), semantic processing of that incoming word is typically facilitated, attenuating the amplitude of the N400 event related potential (ERP) - a direct neural measure of semantic processing. N400 modulation is observed even when the context is a single semantically related "prime" word. This so-called "N400 semantic priming effect" is sensitive to the probability of encountering a related prime-target pair within an experimental block, suggesting that participants may be adapting the strength of their predictions to the predictive validity of their broader experimental environment. We formalize this adaptation using a Bayesian learning model that estimates and updates the probability of encountering a related versus an unrelated prime-target pair on each successive trial. We found that our model's trial-by-trial estimates of target word probability accounted for significant variance in trial-by-trial N400 amplitude. These findings suggest that Bayesian principles contribute to how comprehenders adapt their semantic predictions to the statistical structure of their broader environment, with implications for the functional significance of the N400 component and the predictive nature of language processing

Scaling Up Local Food Sourcing: a Multi-Campus Farm to College Pilot (2015)

Presented at the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium Conference

Points saillants du rapport préliminaire sur le statut des étudiantes graduées en histoire au Canada

Dans le cadre du congrès des Sociétés savantes tenu à Victoria en Colombie- Britannique, on nous a demandé de participer en tant que groupe de femmes étudiantes à une séance de discussion portant sur la place de la femme dans la profession d’historien

Collective Impact: Results from a Multi-Campus Farm to College Pilot Program

Presented at Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference and State of NY Sustainability Conference

Scaling Up Local Food Sourcing: a Multi-Campus Farm to College Pilot

Presented at Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference and State of NY Sustainability Conference