Information content of dopamine signals during natural behavior

Adrienne Fairhall
Professor, Department of Physiology and Biophysics
and co-Director, Computational Neuroscience Center,
University of Washington, Seattle

Abstract
While dopamine is often considered to convey reward prediction errors, it is also implicated in movement initiation and action selection. Drosophila mushroom bodies are critical for learning and provide a compact circuit in which to study the role of dopamine. Using imaging during naturalistic movement outside the context of a learning paradigm, we demonstrate that dopaminergic inputs multiplex multiple sensorimotor inputs.  As an additional example, we show an analysis of dopaminergic signalling during birdsong.

Invited by Rosa Cossart