Karly Turner

• PhD, BSc, BA
• PostDoc Position at UNSW Sydney

Compulsive actions have been confusingly described as reflecting both excessive habitual and excessive goal-directed action control. Here we sought to resolve this contradiction by inducing the neuropathology commonly observed in individuals with compulsive disorders, specifically by causing neuroinflammation in the dorsomedial striatum of rats. We...

Habits help to reduce cognitive load and free up resources required for dynamic goal-directed decisions. The prefrontal cortex has been largely implicated in the latter, but cortical manipulations have also helped to unravel important features about how habits and goal-directed systems co-exist. This chapter will focus on the role of the prefrontal...

Goal‐directed and habitual actions are clearly defined by their associative relations. Whereas goal‐directed control can be confirmed via tests of outcome devaluation and contingency‐degradation sensitivity, a comparable criterion for positively detecting habits has not been established. To confirm habitual responding, a test of control by the stim...

Habits are the subject of intense international research. Under the associative dual-process model the outcome devaluation paradigm has been used extensively to classify behaviours as being either goal-directed (sensitive to shifts in the value of associated outcomes) or habitual (triggered by stimuli without anticipation of consequences). This has...

Habits are the subject of intense international research. Under the associative dual-process model the outcome devaluation paradigm has been used extensively to classify behaviours as being either goal-directed (sensitive to shifts in the value of associated outcomes) or habitual (triggered by stimuli without anticipation of consequences). This has...

The shift in control from dorsomedial to dorsolateral striatum during skill and habit formation has been well established, but whether striatal subregions orchestrate this shift cooperatively or competitively remains unclear. Cortical inputs have also been implicated in the shift toward automaticity, but it is unknown whether they mirror their down...

The shift in control from dorsomedial to dorsolateral striatum during skill and habit formation is well established, but whether striatal subregions orchestrate this shift co-operatively or competitively remains unclear. Cortical inputs have also been implicated in the shift towards automaticity. Do cortical inputs mirror their downstream striatal...

Abnormal orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity is one of the most common findings from neuroimaging studies of individuals with compulsive disorders such as substance use disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder. The nature of this abnormality is complex, however, with some studies reporting the OFC to be over-active in compulsive individuals relat...

Abnormal orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity is one of the most common findings from neuroimaging studies of individuals with compulsive disorders such as substance use disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The nature of this abnormality is complex however, with some studies reporting the OFC to be over-active in compulsive individuals relati...

Everyday activities require adaptive decision-making and control over our actions to achieve our goals. Sub-regions within the cortex are widely reported to regulate these choices. Here we review rodent studies from two disparate fields of instrumental action control – goal-directed and habitual responding, and impulsive and compulsive behaviour. O...

Sources of variation and reproducibility in rodent tests of cognition. Genetic and environmental conditions are known to alter behavioural outcomes, yet animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders are typically developed using a single strain and standard housing conditions. This study examined two rat strains and the influence of different housing...

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders commonly characterised by verbal and non-verbal communication deficits, impaired social interaction and repetitive, stereotypic behaviours. The aetiology of ASD is most likely a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Epidemiological evidence suggests that prenatal...

Psychostimulants, such as amphetamine, are widely used to treat attentional deficits. In humans, response to dopaminergic medications is complex with improvement often dependent on baseline performance. Our goal was to determine if attention in rats could be improved by low dose amphetamine in a baseline-dependent manner by examining the relationsh...

Reversal learning can be used to examine deficits in cognitive flexibility, which have been linked to a number of neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and addiction. However, methods of examining reversal learning have varied substantially between species. Touchscreen technology has allowed researchers to explore cognitive deficits wi...

Background: Epidemiological evidence suggests that developmental vitamin D (DVD) deficiency is a risk factor for neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. DVD deficiency in rats is associated with altered brain structure and adult behaviours indicating alterations in dopamine and glutamate signalling. Developmental alterations in dopamine...

Touchscreen technology is increasingly being used to characterize cognitive performance in rodent models of neuropsychiatric disorders. Researchers are attracted to the automated system and translational potential for touchscreen-based tasks. However, training time is extensive and some mouse strains have struggled to learn touchscreen tasks. Here...

Rationale: Attentional deficits occur in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Psychostimulants are one of the main treatments for attentional deficits, yet there are limited reports of procognitive effects of amphetamine in preclinical studies. Therefore, task development may be...

Neuropsychiatric research has utilised cognitive testing in rodents to improve our understanding of cognitive deficits and for preclinical drug development. However, more sophisticated cognitive tasks have not been as widely exploited due to low throughput and the extensive training time required. We developed a modified signal detection task (SDT)...

Rationale: Repeated exposure to psychostimulants that either increase dopamine (DA) release or target N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors can induce behavioural sensitisation, a phenomenon that may be important for the processes of addiction and even psychosis. A critical component of behavioural sensitisation is an increase in DA release within...

Developmental vitamin D (DVD) deficiency has been proposed as a risk factor for schizophrenia. DVD-deficient rats show selective cognitive deficits and novelty-induced hyperlocomotion and enhanced locomotor responses from acute treatment with psychomimetic drugs, such as amphetamine and MK-801. Here we aimed to examine the effect of a drug from a d...

Genetic (G) and environmental (E) manipulations are known to alter behavioural outcomes in rodents, however many animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders only use a restricted selection of strain and housing conditions. The aim of this study was to examine GxE interactions comparing two outbred rat strains, which were housed in either standard o...

Vitamin D deficiency is common in the adult population, and this has been linked to depression and cognitive outcomes in clinical populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of adult vitamin D (AVD) deficiency on behavioural tasks of relevance to neuropsychiatric disorders in male Sprague-Dawley rats. Ten-week old male Sprague...

Schizophrenia is associated with many genetic and environmental risk factors and there is growing evidence that the interactions between genetic and environmental "hits" are critical for disease onset. Animal models of schizophrenia have traditionally used specific strain and housing conditions to test potential risk factors. As the field moves tow...

Evidence from epidemiological studies suggest that low levels of vitamin D during early life alter brain development and may increase the risk of various adverse health outcomes, including schizophrenia. The aim of this experiment was to examine the effect of developmental vitamin D (DVD) deficiency on attentional processing using the 5-choice seri...

Abnormal dopamine (DA) signaling is often suggested as causative in schizophrenia. The other prominent hypothesis for this disorder, largely driven by epidemiological data, is that certain adverse events during the early stages of brain development increase an individual's risk of developing schizophrenia later in life. However, the clinical and pr...

Epidemiological evidence suggests that Developmental Vitamin D (DVD) deficiency is associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. DVD deficiency in mice is associated with altered behaviour, however there has been no detailed investigation of cognitive behaviours in DVD-deficient mice. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of DVD d...

Statistical analysis of gene expression. Table S1 shows the analysis of quantitative expression of mosquito genes related to dopamine pathway

Wolbachia is an intracellular bacterium that has been stably transinfected into the mosquito vector of dengue, Aedes aegypti. This inherited infection causes a range of metabolic and phenotypic alterations in the mosquito, which might be related to neuronal abnormalities. In order to determine if these alterations were caused by the manipulation of...