Brian Sweis

• Ph.D. (2018), M.D. candidate (2020)
• University of Minnesota

Those with diabetes mellitus are at high-risk of developing psychiatric disorders, especially mood disorders, yet the link between hyperglycemia and altered motivation has not been thoroughly explored. Here, we characterized value-based decision-making behavior of a streptozocin-induced diabetic mouse model on Restaurant Row, a naturalistic neuroec...

Current theories of decision making suggest that the neural circuits in mammalian brains (including humans) computationally combine representations of the past (memory), present (perception), and future (agentic goals) to take actions that achieve the needs of the agent. How information is represented within those neural circuits changes what compu...

How mood interacts with information processing in the brain is thought to mediate the maladaptive behaviors observed in depressed individuals. However, the neural mechanisms underlying impairments in emotion-cognition interactions are poorly understood. This includes influencing the balance between how past-sensitive vs. future-looking one is durin...

Changing one’s mind is a complex cognitive phenomenon involving a continuous re-appraisal of the trade-off between past costs and future value. Recent work modeling this behavior across species has established associations between aspects of this choice process and their contributions to altered decision-making in psychopathology. Here, we investig...

Those with diabetes mellitus are at high-risk of developing psychiatric disorders, yet the link between hyperglycemia and alterations in motivated behavior has not been explored in detail. We characterized value-based decision-making behavior of a streptozocin-induced diabetic mouse model on a naturalistic neuroeconomic foraging paradigm called Res...

Objectives The use of topical corticosteroids to manage postoperative sinonasal symptoms after endoscopic skull base surgery (ESBS) has not been well studied. We quantified long‐term impact of postoperative steroid irrigations (SIs) on quality of life of patients after ESBS. Methods Retrospective review of patients at the University of Pennsylvani...

Economic stress can serve as a “second-hit” for those who already accumulated a history of adverse life experiences. How one recovers from a setback is a core feature of resilience but is seldom captured in animal studies. We challenged mice in a novel two-hit stress model by exposing animals to chronic social defeat stress (first-hit) and then tes...

The nucleus accumbens shell (NAcSh) is critically important for reward valuations, yet it remains unclear how valuation information is integrated in this region to drive behaviour during reinforcement learning. Using an optogenetic spatial self-stimulation task in mice, here we show that contingent activation of different excitatory inputs to the N...

Drug discovery for psychiatric conditions is stagnating. Behavioral changes could be used as a primary phenotypic screen for new drug candidates, if enough useful data can be generated from behavioral models. Could machine learning be the answer to extracting the data we need? Behavioral changes could be used as a primary phenotypic screen for new...

Sunk cost sensitivity describes escalating decision commitment with increased spent resources. On neuroeconomic foraging tasks, mice, rats, and humans show similar escalations from sunk costs while quitting an ongoing countdown to reward. In a new analysis taken across computationally parallel foraging tasks across species and laboratories, we find...

Regret describes recognizing alternative actions could have led to better outcomes. It remains unclear whether regret derives from generalized mistake appraisal or instead comprises dissociable, action-specific processes. Using a neuroeconomic task, we found that mice were sensitive to fundamentally distinct types of regret following exposure to ch...

In a recent bioRxiv preprint, Ott et al. argue that sensitivities to sunk costs that have been reported in two serial foraging tasks (the Restaurant Row task in mice and rats, and the Web-Surf task in humans) may be due to simple consequences of the way that subjects perform these tasks and not due to an actual sensitivity to sunk costs. However, s...

In the century since the notion of the ‘engram’ was first introduced to describe the physical manifestation of memory, new technologies for identifying cellular activity have enabled us to deepen our understanding of the possible physical substrate of memory. A number of studies have shown that memories are stored in a sparse population of neurons...

A central question in aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) is when and how neural substrates underlying decision-making are altered. Here we show that while APP mice, a commonly used mouse model of AD, were able to learn Restaurant Row, a complex neuroeconomic decision-making task, they were significantly impaired in procedural, habit-forming, aspect...

Background Aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease (AERD) is an aggressive inflammatory disorder of the upper and lower respiratory tract. Corticosteroids, leukotriene modifiers, endoscopic sinus surgery (ESS), aspirin (ASA) desensitization, and biological immunomodulators are currently used to treat the disorder. Objective The objective of this s...

Background High‐dose, high‐volume steroid nasal irrigations (NSI) have been incorporated into the medical management of recalcitrant CRS, primarily following surgical intervention. The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of NSI as a preoperative management and to identify the percentage of patients who ultimately underwent ESS for reca...

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Decision-making impairments in addiction can arise from dysfunction in distinct neural circuits. Such processes can be dissociated by measuring complex, computationally distinct behaviors within an economic framework. We aim to characterize computational changes conserved across models of addiction. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We us...

Objective: First branchial cleft anomalies (FBCAs) are rare and often misdiagnosed, which can delay proper management and increase surgical risks. Complete excision often requires parotidectomy with facial nerve dissection. The literature reports that younger patients more often have lesions deep to the nerve with higher rates of nerve injury. We...

Addiction is considered to be a neurobiological disorder of learning and memory because addiction is capable of producing lasting changes in the brain. Recovering addicts chronically struggle with making poor decisions that ultimately lead to relapse, suggesting a view of addiction also as a neurobiological disorder of decision-making information p...

The impact of time wasted The amount of time already spent on a task influences human choice about whether to continue. This dedicated time, known as the “sunk cost,” reduces the likelihood of giving up the pursuit of a reward, even when there is no indication of likely success. Sweis et al. show that this sensitivity to time invested occurs simila...

Neuroeconomic theories propose changes in decision making drive relapse in recovering drug addicts, resulting in continued drug use despite stated wishes not to. Such conflict is thought to arise from multiple valuation systems dependent on separable neural components, yet many neurobiology of addiction studies employ only simple tests of value. He...

Regret can be defined as the subjective experience of recognizing that one has made a mistake and that a better alternative could have been selected. The experience of regret is thought to carry negative utility. This typically takes two distinct forms: augmenting immediate postregret valuations to make up for losses, and augmenting long-term chang...

Significance Synaptic remodeling in the infralimbic-to-accumbens shell (IL–NAcSh) circuit is linked to addiction relapse susceptibility; however, how these changes interact with decision-making computations remains unclear. We develop a neurophysiological assay to measure the strength of a specific circuit at the ensemble level. We then use that as...

Background: Hyperglycemia is common in extremely low gestational age newborns (ELGAN) and is associated with increased mortality and morbidity, including abnormal neurodevelopment. Hippocampus-mediated cognitive deficits are common in this population, but the specific effects of hyperglycemia on the developing hippocampus are not known. Methods:...

The use of rodent stroke models allow for the understanding of stroke pathophysiology. There is currently no gold standard neurological assessment to measure deficits and recovery from stroke in rodent models. Agreement on a universal preclinical stroke scale allows for comparison of the outcomes among conducted studies. The present study aimed to...

The elevated plus maze (EPM) is used to assess anxiety in rodents. Beam-walking tasks are used to assess vestibulomotor function. Brain injury in rodents can disrupt performance on both of these tasks. Developing novel paradigms that integrate tasks like these can reduce the need for multiple tests when attempting to assess multiple behaviors in th...

Chronic stress has been shown to impair memory, however, the extent to which memory can be impaired is often variable across individuals. Predisposed differences in particular traits, such as anxiety, may reveal underlying neurobiological mechanisms that could be driving individual differences in sensitivity to stress and, thus, stress resiliency....

Inhibitory control is an important aspect of analogical reasoning critically dependent on prefrontal cortex. We used a novel visual analogy paradigm with scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to explore several ways the brain uses inhibitory control to perform analogy. Previous studies have suggested that inhibitory control helps to manage working mem...