Disputas- Master i biologi John Chukwuma Oyem

Avhandlingen er tilgjengelig her! The doctoral thesis!  Prøveforelesning over oppgitt emne holdes kl. 10.15:   Plastic changes in motivated behaviors Prøveforelesningen vil også bli strømmet/the trial lecture will also be streamed.  Disputasen starter kl. 1215 Disputasen vil bli strømmet her. Opptak av disputasen vil være tilgjengelig i et døgn. The defense will be streamed here.  A recording of the disputation will be available for 24 hours.

Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag av avhandlingen:

Sexual behavior is a rewarding behavior essential for species survival. This thesis explores how the brain orchestrates sexual behavior. To understand the organization of female rat sexual behavior, we first analyzed their copulatory patterns. In the second study, we demonstrated that sexual motivation can be divided into sexual incentive motivation, which is the drive to initiate mating and motivation to continue copulation, the drive to sustain copulation. These provided valuable tools for studying the underlying neural mechanism. Hence, we studied the role of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in female rats' copulation and tested whether a junk food diet affects it. We showed that the VTA encodes the start of dart, a behavior that signals her readiness to mate, and the reward perceived from copulation. In addition, junk food reduced VTA activity, but did not change copulatory parameters.
Together, these findings offer new insights into the neural mechanisms of sexual behavior.

Hovedveileder:
Professor Eelke Snoeren, Institutt for psykologi, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.

Bi-veiledere:
Professor James McCutcheon, Institutt for psykologi, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.
Dr. Patty Huijgens, Institutt for psykologi, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.

Bedømmelseskomité:
Professor Sarah Meerts, Carleton College, USA - 1. opponent.
Professor Raúl Paredes Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Juriquilla- 2. Opponent.
Professor Claudia Rodríguez-Aranda, Institutt for psykologi, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet – leder av komité.
 

Disputasleder: Instituttleder Per Håkan Brøndbo, Institutt for psykologi, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.