What does dopamine mean?

By Joshua D. Berke. Nature Neuroscience, 2018

753 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem: how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move? It is often presumed that motivation involves slow (‘tonic’) dopamine changes, while fast (‘phasic’) dopamine fluctuations convey reward prediction errors for learning. Yet recent studies have shown that dopamine conveys motivational value and promotes movement even on subsecond timescales. Here I describe an alternative account of how dopamine regulates ongoing behavior. Dopamine release related to motivation is rapidly and locally sculpted by receptors on dopamine terminals, independently from dopamine cell firing. Target neurons abruptly switch between learning and performance modes, with striatal cholinergic interneurons providing one candidate switch mechanism. The behavioral impact of dopamine varies by subregion, but in each case dopamine provides a dynamic estimate of whether it is worth expending a limited internal resource, such as energy, attention, or time. In this Perspective, Josh Berke discusses recent developments in the study of dopamine function. He proposes a model that explains how dopamine can serve as both a learning signal and as a critical modulator of motivated decision-making.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18b21866068f0368fe4aa3025c2dce4ab203a01b

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Citations in the corpus

Distributional reinforcement learning in the brain (2020, background): “The information conveyed by different dopamine neurons varies greatly based on their projection targets [27 – 30], with the dopamine neurons in the VTA that project to the ventral part of the striatum (nucleus accumbens) thought to mainly signal RPEs (but see [31,32]).”
Synaptic Plasticity Forms and Functions. (2020, background): “The dependence of reward-motivated behavior on dopamine (DA) neuron activity and DA receptor activation is a well-documented example (Schultz 2007, Steinberg et al. 2013, Pignatelli & Bonci 2015, Berke 2018).”
The Drosophila Mushroom Body: From Architecture to Algorithm in a Learning Circuit. (2020, background): “First, DAN activity is very dynamically coupled to a fly’s behavioral state (Berry et al. 2015, Cohn et al. 2015), indicating that dopamine may modify circuit function on a very short timescale.”
Dopamine and Cognitive Control in Prefrontal Cortex. (2019, background): “Neurotransmitters acting on terminals can cause local release of dopamine, irrespective of the activity of such dopamine neurons [155].”