Cecilia Martinez, Assistant Researcher at CONICET and Head of Practical Work at FCEyN-UBA, has been awarded the prestigious Ben Barres Spotlight Award after publishing her work titled "Dorsal striatum coding for the timely execution of action sequences" in eLife. This work reports neural correlates of impulsive behavior in adolescent rats. Briefly, the animals were trained to wait a certain amount of time before performing a learned behavior that leads to a reward. Adolescent rats are more likely to initiate the behavior prematurely, thereby missing the opportunity to obtain the reward. Behavioral differences between adolescent and adult rats correlate with differences in striatal neuronal activity that occurs while the animal is waiting, just before initiating the behavior. This study is pioneering in demonstrating changes in neural activity related to impulsivity and adolescence.

Martinez MC, Zold CL, Coletti MA, Murer MG, Belluscio MA. Dorsal striatum coding for the timely execution of action sequences. Elife. 2022 Nov 25;11:e74929. doi: 10.7554/eLife.74929. En PubMed. En BioRxiv.