Institute for Advanced Study Professor
A fundamental goal of psychiatry is the ability to control emotion and anxiety. To address this, Ken-ichi developed a behavioral paradigm called, “approach-avoidance conflict,” to quantitatively characterize the value judgment in decision-making. His overarching goal is to identify the causative role of specific brain regions involved in anxiety and emotional conflict by manipulating specific brain circuits in primates and measuring the resulting changes in internal states. He plans to combine physiological, computational and anatomical methods to characterize the anxiety-related network in the cortico-basal ganglia system.