Dopamine modulates subcortical responses to surprising sounds.

ABSTRACT: Dopamine guides behavior and learning through pleasure, according to classic understanding. Dopaminergic neurons are traditionally thought to signal positive or negative prediction errors (PEs) when reward expectations are, respectively, exceeded or not matched. These signed PEs are quite different from the unsigned PEs, which report surprise during sensory processing. But mounting theoretical accounts from the predictive processing framework postulate that dopamine, as a neuromodulator, could potentially regulate the postsynaptic gain of sensory neurons, thereby scaling unsigned PEs according to their expected precision or confidence. Despite ample modeling work, the physiological effects of dopamine on the processing of surprising sensory information are yet to be addressed experimentall

SUBMITTER: Valdes-Baizabal C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7329133 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature