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Functional Analysis of Dopamine Prediction Error Circuits

Ziel

One of the key goals in neuroscience is to understand how neural activity generates behavior. Electrophysiological recordings have provided great insights into this relationship, but they cannot resolve the contribution of specific neuronal cell types. Moreover, it has been notoriously difficult to move beyond correlation and demonstrate the functional significance of neural firing for specific behaviors. Recently developed optogenetic techniques overcome these limitations by tagging specific neuronal populations for electrophysiological identification and manipulation in vivo. The experiments described in this proposal apply this approach to midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons in awake, behaving mice.
DA neurons are key players in reward-processing. They respond to unexpected rewards and sensory cues predicting future rewards, while unexpected reward omission suppresses them. Thus, DA neurons seem to encode the discrepancy between predicted and actual reward, also called reward prediction errors. Based on formal theories of reinforcement learning, it has been proposed that DA acts as a teaching signal to mediate learning from reward. Here, we propose to evaluate the causal relationship between DA activation to reward-predicting cues and ongoing behavior, learning and extinction. Moreover, we will perform an analysis of the neuronal computations underlying dopamine’s role in reinforcement learning to understand how DA responses are generated at the circuit level. Since disturbances of reinforcement learning have been directly linked to human pathological conditions including schizophrenia, depression and autism as well as maladaptive behaviors in addiction, the research program put forward in this proposal has broad implications for improving our understanding of these pathological conditions and may ultimately support the development of novel interventional strategies.

Wissenschaftliches Gebiet

CORDIS klassifiziert Projekte mit EuroSciVoc, einer mehrsprachigen Taxonomie der Wissenschaftsbereiche, durch einen halbautomatischen Prozess, der auf Verfahren der Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache beruht.

Aufforderung zur Vorschlagseinreichung

FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG
Andere Projekte für diesen Aufruf anzeigen

Koordinator

VIB VZW
EU-Beitrag
€ 100 000,00
Adresse
SUZANNE TASSIERSTRAAT 1
9052 ZWIJNAARDE - GENT
Belgien

Auf der Karte ansehen

Region
Vlaams Gewest Prov. Oost-Vlaanderen Arr. Gent
Aktivitätstyp
Research Organisations
Kontakt Verwaltung
Rik Audenaert (Mr.)
Links
Gesamtkosten
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