Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits a nonassociative emotional salience signal.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive decision making relies on proper discrimination and prediction of positive and negative events. The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is central to this valence encoding, assigning emotional value to stimuli to drive appropriate behavioral responses. The ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is classically known to regulate associative learning and incentive motivation via dopamine projections to the striatum, also contains strong dopamine projections to the BLA, but this system has received much less attention. Here, we investigated how in vivo BLA dopamine signaling is engaged durning learning. We show that reward cues evoke BLA dopamine signals that diminish, rather than grow, with training. As the complexity of the learning context was increased, where rats actively differentiat

SUBMITTER: Brickner MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12132325 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature