Fear and Reward: Role of Dopamine in Predictive Learning

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The ability to make predictions about the world and update those predictions with new information is essential to everyday functioning. The current research program seeks to shed light on how dopamine and target brain structures processes the establishment of predictive learning and how these predictions can be modified in the face of changing contingencies in the appetitive and aversive settings. The project will employ a combination of causal (optogenetics) and correlational (in vivo electrophysiology) neuroscience techniques in order to examine how excitation and inhibition of specific neuronal types (dopamine cells) lead to alternation in learning, behavior, and neural firing in brain areas that receive direct dopamine input. This project will specifically seek to determine whether dopamine processes learning about fear and reward in similar or opposing fashion. This will be done by employing a blocking design and examining whether dopamine regulates learning via error-correcting or value mechanisms, whether it plays a role in regulating attentional processes, as well as determine what information is carried by the dopamine signal at time of prediction and whether inhibiting this signal reinstates learning and neural firing to expected rewards. This research will shed important light on dopamine function in learning more generally by looking at both fear and reward learning.