Calendar Event
Full Professor Lecture Series: Donna Toufexis
Title: Habits, Goals, Sex, Stress, and Hormones
Habits can be adaptive because they allow brain regions that are involved in cognition to focus on other goals. Many psychopathologies, including substance abuse and obsessive-compulsive disorder, involve maladaptive habitual behavior. We found a sex-difference in the rate of habit formation such that female rats respond in a habitual manner with markedly less instrumental training than males. We have begun to characterize the underlying mechanisms that contribute to this sex difference. For example, we found that a type of hormonal birth control delays the development of habit in female rats, while exposure to acute stress advances it. Our goal is to understand how sex and sex hormones modulate specific neural circuits and brain regions that govern the development and expression of habit.
For more information, contact Celeste Piette at (802) 656-3166 or cpiette@uvm.edu.