Neuroscience Seminar Series: Sven Bestmann (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL): "Uncertainty, neuromodulation and action"

Uncertainty, neuromodulation and action

Recent and ongoing work in our lab addresses the role of neuromodulatory systems for encoding and representing contextual uncertainty. Specifically, I will focus on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine for two types of uncertainty, event uncertainty and temporal uncertainty, and how dealing with this uncertainty is compromised in disorders characterized by a dopamine deficit. Dopamine-related impairments, however, not only apply to contextual inference and the selection of actions based on our inferences about this uncertainty, but also to the precision of actions, i.e. the quality of their execution. One issue thus concerns the question about the role of dopamine to guide the selection and precision of actions in an uncertain world.

Host: Rogier Mars.