Dopamine facilitates associative memory encoding in the entorhinal cortex.

ABSTRACT: Mounting evidence shows that dopamine in the striatum is critically involved in reward-based reinforcement learning^1,2. However, it remains unclear how dopamine reward signals influence the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit, another brain network that is crucial for learning and memory^3-5. Here, using cell-type-specific electrophysiological recording⁶, we show that dopamine signals from the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra control the encoding of cue-reward association rules in layer 2a fan cells of the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC). When mice learned novel olfactory cue-reward associations using a pre-learned association rule, spike representations of LEC fan cells grouped newly learned rewarded cues with a pre-learned rewarded cue, but separated

SUBMITTER: Lee JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8744500 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature