Cue-Evoked Dopamine Promotes Conditioned Responding during Learning

Abstract

Highlights d Inconsequential novel, but not familiar, stimuli activate VTA and SNc dopamine neurons d Intrinsic stimulus value modulates dopamine responses to novel stimuli d Dopamine activation during familiar CS accelerates conditioning d Dopamine inhibition during novel CS decelerates conditioning

Novelty is not Surprise: Human exploratory and adaptive behavior in sequential decision-making

“…Importantly, we found that NPE is a variable that has explanatory power for the ERP which adds to, and is di↵erent from, the explanatory power provided by Reward, RPE, or Surprise. The manifestation of a separate NPE signal in neural activities may open a new door for further developments of theories and experiments on novelty-driven activity of dopaminergic neurons and other neuromodulators [14,15,49,50].…”

Dopamine release and its control over early Pavlovian learning differs between the NAc core and medial NAc shell

“…Recent optogenetic studies have produced conflicting results regarding dopamine’s involvement in conditioned responding, with some highlighting a role for dopamine during reward-predictive cues and others indicating a role for dopamine during the reward presentation [23-25]. Here, we examined how endogenous dopamine responses to the CS and US relate to conditioned responding across training sessions.…”

“…Conditioned responding can be modulated by the dopamine response to cues and rewards, though this can depend on task parameters and prior training [14,26,31,32]. We previously found that conditioned responding updates with cue-specific changes in dopamine release in well-trained animals.…”

Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) Implemented: Towards Reverse Engineering Consciousness with the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference

“…These higher-order functionalities may be achieved via frontal cortices being more capable of temporally-extended generative modeling [90], and also potentially by virtue of being located further from primary sensory cortices, so affording ("counterfactually rich") dynamics that are more decoupled from immediate sensorimotor contingencies. Further, these frontal control hierarchies afford multi-scale goal-oriented behavior via bidirectional effective connectivity with the basal ganglia (i.e., winner-take-all dynamics and facilitation of sequential operations) and canalization via diffuse neuromodulator nuclei of the brainstem (i.e., implicit policies and value signals) [91][92][93][94][95]. Finally, the frontal pole is described as a highly non-linear recurrent system capable of shaping overall activity via bifurcating capacities [96,97]-with potentially astronomical combinatorics-providing sources of novelty and rapid adaptation via situation-specific attractor dynamics.…”