Muhammad Badarnee, PhD
Muhammad Badarnee, PhD
Embedded Files
Research
Research
Dr. Badarnee studies the neural circuits that shape Pavlovian fear learning, memory retrieval, and threat-related behaviors. His work focuses on mapping thalamo-limbic and cortical pathways involved in associative threat learning in both healthy individuals and people with psychiatric conditions such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.
His research follows two complementary directions:
• Identifying how the brain forms new learning and how this learning is later recalled.
• Investigating these mechanisms in clinical populations to help develop brain-based interventions that reduce symptoms and support mental health.
What is associative learning?
What is associative learning?
More than a hundred years ago, Ivan Pavlov showed that if you repeatedly play a sound right before giving a dog food, the sound alone can eventually make the dog start to salivate.
This is called associative learning: the dog learns to link the sound with food and reacts to the sound as if food is coming.
How does associative learning help us to study threat?
How does associative learning help us to study threat?
Canonical paradigms
Animal model of Pavlovian fear conditioning
Animal model of Pavlovian fear conditioning
Animal model of Pavlovian fear conditioning. An electric shock is paired with a sound, and brain activity is recorded during the learning process.
Translational model of fear conditioning
Translational model of fear conditioning
Human translational model. While participants are in the fMRI scanner, we perform Pavlovian fear conditioning and record their brain activation. In this example, the green light is paired with the shock, while the yellow light is never paired with it. Over a few trials, participants learn that the green light predicts an unpleasant experience. This design allows us to examine how the brain responds and adapts during the learning process in controls and psychiatric conditions.
These classical models simulate aversive events, enabling the study of how the brain detects threats in healthy individuals and how this process may differ in psychopathology.
These classical models simulate aversive events, enabling the study of how the brain detects threats in healthy individuals and how this process may differ in psychopathology.
Fear conditioning models — created by Muhammad Badarnee using BioRender.com
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse