Assessing the role of the rodent prefrontal cortex in anxiety during reward seeking

The primary focus of this dissertation was to develop methods to model learning to adjust action as a function of risk using rats to assess neural representations of actions in a state of learned approach-avoidance conflict. Once the appropriate behavioral model was developed, I focused on involvement of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in encoding key events in behaving male and female rats in part because: 1) conflict is believed to engage higher level control processes which are a key function of the PFC, and 2) PFC dysfunction is a common observation across psychopathologies mentioned above.