The experience of control over an aversive stimulus influences avoidance or escape behavior during future encounters under aversive conditions. We aim to investigate how the brain represents such “controllability” – i.e. the ability to influence an aversive stimulus and the perception of control. We also investigate whether this representation differs between appetitive and aversive stimuli. To titrate stimulus intensity across the two valences, we use an approach-avoidance conflict task. We are currently developing a task for rats that compares controllable and non-controllable conditions and examines differences between appetitive and aversive stimuli within the same context. This task will be used to study how corticostriatal networks contribute to controllability encoding.
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Ingo Willuhn, i.willuhn@nin.knaw.nl
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