Jeremiah Cohen: Neuromodulation of dynamic decision making

Allen Institute

We are interested in how the nervous system learns from experience in dynamic environments. We trained mice on a dynamic foraging task, in which they freely chose between two alternatives that delivered reward with changing probabilities. We found two types of norepinephrine neurons in the locus coeruleus, including one that provided a reward prediction error for cortex. Serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe represented a quantity related to reward uncertainty over long timescales (tens of seconds), consistent with a modulatory signal used to adjust learning rates of ongoing decision variables in frontal cortex. Our results provide quantitative links between activity of two key neuromodulators--serotonin neurons and norepinephrine neurons--and dynamic behavior.

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Torben Ott / Margret Franke