DCCN Colloquium by Miriam Klein-Flügge

Miriam is a neuroscientist interested in emotion, motivation and decision-making and an Associate Professor and Wellcome Henry Dale Fellow at Oxford University. Her work aims to understand how the human brain enables us to flexibly adjust our decisions to complex internal and external circumstances. For example, when decisions require physical effort (motivation), sequences of actions, or taking into account changes of context. She uses brain imaging (fMRI, MEG) as well as causal stimulation techniques (TMS, tDCS, ultrasound) to study these processes.

In this talk, she will present recent work examining deep subcortical circuits and their interactions with the prefrontal cortex during affective decision-making. She will focus on three complementary strands of research that together inform our understanding of these networks. First, she will describe progress in resolving small subcortical structures that are critical for emotional and motivational processes—such as the amygdala and hypothalamus—at the level of individual subnuclei. Using high-resolution neuroimaging, we show nucleus-specific patterns of brain connectivity that explain variance in mental well-being, including individual differences in negative affect and stress. Second, she will discuss advances in causal approaches that allow us to move beyond correlational descriptions of function and directly manipulate activity non-invasively in deep brain circuits. Using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), they have characterised the causal contribution of the basolateral amygdala to affective approach–avoidance decisions, and ongoing work extends this approach to examine the causal role of individual amygdala subnuclei. The third section turns to ongoing work examining motivational processing at both shorter and longer time scales, focusing on 7T-neuroimaging and TUS to study the role of limbic and striatal regions and their interactions. Taken together, their work in human cognitive neuroscience has moved from correlational studies with coarser anatomical and functional resolution towards causal investigations of deep subcortical-cortical brain circuits at the functional scale of individual nuclei and using timescales relevant to flexible behaviour. They believe this represents an important step towards understanding the neural mechanisms underlying affective decision-making across health and disease.