BEACON Seminar: Shining a light on dopamine signalling during inference guided choice

ABSTRACT

During flexible behaviour, dopamine is thought to carry reward prediction errors (RPEs), which update values and hence modify future behaviour. However, in real-world situations where the statistical relationships in the environment can be learned, continuously adapting values is not always the most efficient way of adapting to change.  In such partial observable structured environments, as is found in many real-world situations, it is not well understood what kind of information dopamine conveys or its causal role in shaping adaptive behaviour.  Here, I'll describe a set of studies where we measured and manipulated dopamine while mice performed a sequential decision task.  I'll show that, while dopamine tracks a wide range of information, shaped by the inferred state of the task, it does not carry the key information that animals are using to rapidly update their choices.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marta has recently finished her DPhil here at the department of Experimental Psychology and is going to talk about some of her work on dopamine and decision-making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.25.449995v2

ADDITIONAL INFO

The seminar will take place in person only at the Department of Experimental Psychology, New Radcliffe House (Seminar Room 2), Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6NW.  

Seminar locations will be circulated the week before seminars. For online seminars, links for joining will be sent out before each seminar. 

If you have suggestions for future speakers, please contact Lauren (lauren.burgeno@dpag.ox.ac.uk), or Nima (nima.khalighinejad@psy.ox.ac.uk).