From Defense to Inference: How the Brain Constructs Emotional States, Actions & Memories

Host: Nadine Gogolla

About the talk: Innately aversive experiences trigger defensive reactions, generate emotional states, and form memories, but adaptive behavior also requires learning which actions control threat and using past experience to infer danger in new situations. My laboratory studies the circuits and neural codes that support these increasingly flexible forms of emotional behavior. I will describe a brainstem-amygdala pathway that integrates the sensory features of aversive events with ongoing defensive actions to construct a sensorimotor representation that regulates behavior and instructs fear memory formation. Extending this principle, I will discuss recent avoidance studies showing that the amygdala conveys information about actions performed during threat to the nucleus accumbens, where successful actions are reinforced and increasingly represented prospectively. Finally, I will show that medial prefrontal cortex neurons construct an internal model linking directly and indirectly associated predictors of threat to support emotional inference. Together, these findings suggest that a hierarchical organization in emotion processing circuits which integrate sensory events, bodily and behavioral state, action-outcome relationships, and learned associative structure to transform reactive defense into flexible control and inference.

Biography: Joshua Johansen, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, and Team Director at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan. His laboratory uses systems and circuit neuroscience approaches to study the neural mechanisms of emotion, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior, with the broader goal of identifying principles of neural coding and plasticity relevant to psychiatric disease.