Dopamine neurons encoding long-term memory of object value for habitual behavior
By Hyoung F. Kim, Ali Ghazizadeh, Okihide Hikosaka. 2015
140 citations recorded by the source corpus.
SUMMARY Dopamine neurons promote learning by processing recent changes in reward values, such that reward may be maximized. However, such a flexible signal is not suitable for habitual behaviors that are sustained regardless of recent changes in reward outcome. We discovered a type of dopamine neuron in the monkey substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) that retains past-learned reward values stably. After reward values of visual objects are learned, these neurons continue to respond differentially to the objects, even when reward is not expected. Responses are strengthened by repeated learning and are evoked upon presentation of the objects long after learning is completed. These “sustain-type” dopamine neurons are confined to the caudal-lateral SNc and project to the caudate tail, which encodes long-term value memories of visual objects and guides gaze automatically to stably valued objects. This population of dopamine neurons thus selectively promotes learning and retention of habitual behavior.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
- Yoshinori Aso
- Gerald M. Rubin
- Glenn C. Turner
- Toshihide Hige
- Zhiyuan Lu
- A. Wong
- V. Ruta
- Raphael Cohn
In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Dopaminergic neurons write and update memories with cell-type-specific rules (2016, background): “…and parallel changes with partially overlapping functions (Herry and Johansen, 2014; Hikosaka et al., 2014; Tonegawa et al., 2015); for example, different populations of dopaminergic neurons develop representations of a visual objects’ value with distinct learning rules (Kim et al., 2015).”
- A connectome of a learning and memory center in the adult Drosophila brain (2017, background): “Thus, these cells might release distinct co-transmitters, as has been observed in mammalian brain (Stuber et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2015), which could trigger different signaling cascades in either the KCs or the MBONs to differentially modulate the induction and expression of plasticity across…”