PHILADELPHIA – Joshua Gold, PhD, a professor of Neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Joe Kable, PhD, Baird Term Associate Professor of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, have been awarded a three-year $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The award will help Gold and Kable study the neural basis of decision-making: how the brain can take uncertain information from a variety of sources and form categorical judgments that guide behavior. It is one of 16 such grants awarded nationally and part of the Foundation’s support for fundamental brain research and the BRAIN Initiative, a coordinated research effort to promote the development of neurotechnologies to help researchers answer fundamental questions about how the brain works.
Their project, “The role of noise in mental exploration for learning,” will explore a new theory which postulates that what has previously been dismissed by many researchers as random variability in human behavior might instead reflect adaptable decision-making linked to, among other possible variables, norepinephrine, a neurochemical implicated in learning and arousal.
“We are interested in learning to what extent norepinephrine plays a role in decision-making and other aspects of human personality and behavior,” Gold said. “Can norepinephrine levels in the brain be manipulated to affect complex learning and decision-making behaviors?”
In seeking to answer these and similar questions, Gold and Kable hope to uncover basic knowledge that will help guide the development of new tools to diagnose and overcome conditions associated with abnormal learning and decision-making, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia.
“The resultant knowledge about individual differences in learning will also inform how to best tailor educational and learning practices, as well as how to design computer programs that learn adaptively from experience,” Kable said.
The work is based on a novel hypothesis that, in an unpredictable world, people making decisions face an inherent trade-off: higher certainty leads to more precise and accurate choices when the world is stable but an inability to adjust to change, whereas less certainty can lead to greater adaptability but also more variable and imprecise decisions. The investigators propose that this trade-off is regulated by interactions between arousal and cortical systems, in part mediated by norepinephrine levels.
The two Penn researchers have placed a priority on increasing participation of underrepresented groups in this kind of integrative research, via summer research experiences for high school and undergraduate students. They also aim to increase public awareness of neuroscience via public lectures, Brain Awareness Week activities, and contributions to a website that explains brain research in laymen's terms.
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Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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