Neuroscience Seminar Series: Hanneke Den Ouden (Nijmegen): Knowing when to go: Serotonin (and dopamine) in learning and behavioural control
Tuesday, 14 October 2014, 1pm to 2pm
Serotonin and dopamine have been suggested to subserve motivationally opponent functions, but until recently this hypothesis was untested. I will present a study in which we investigated the dissociable roles of these neurotransmitters in a probabilistic reversal learning paradigm in nearly 700 individuals as a function of genetic variation in the serotonin and dopamine systems. I will then zoom in on serotonin, whose role in motivation processing is much less well understood than for dopamine, and present two pharmacological and a genetics neuroimaging study, in which we investigated the role of serotonin at the interface of aversive processing and behavioural inhibition.