CNS Seminar

One of the major goals of neuroscience is to understand how neural circuits perform computations. It is thought that dopamine neurons calculate the difference between actual and predicted reward, or reward prediction error (RPE). Although it is thought that dopamine signals can be approximated by a simple mathematical formula, it remains unknown whether each dopamine neuron follows the mathematical formula and how such a computation is implemented in neural circuits. In this talk, I will discuss two unpublished studies that examined the homogeneity of RPE computations at the single neuron level as well as our efforts to identify inputs to dopamine neurons that are involved in RPE computations.