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As parents, teachers and pet owners can attest, rewards play a huge role in shaping behaviors in humans and animals. Rewards – whether as edible treats, gifts, words of appreciation or praise, fame or monetary benefits – act as positive reinforcement for the associated behavior. While this correlation between reward and future choice has been used as a well-established paradigm in neuroscience research for well over a century, not much is known about the neural process underlying it, namely how the brain encodes, remembers and translates reward cues to desired behaviors in the future.

A recent study led by Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and vice chair of research in the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, director of the Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Foundation Laboratories and investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children's Hospital, identified beta frequency neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the brain's frontal lobe as the key neural signature underlying processes associated with recognizing rewards and determining subsequent choices and, thus, shaping future behaviors. Furthermore, the study, published in Nature Communications , reports this neural signature is altered in patients with depression, opening an exciting possibility of using these neural signals as a new biomarker and a potential innovative avenue for therapy.



Human beings derive pleasure .

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