Insects adapt their response to stimuli, such as odours, according to their pairing with positive or negative reinforcements, such as sugar or shock. Recent electrophysiological and imaging findings in allow detailed examination of the neural mechanisms supporting the acquisition, forgetting, and assimilation of memories. We propose that this data can be explained by the combination of a dopaminergic plasticity rule that supports a variety of synaptic strength change phenomena, and a circuit structure (derived from neuroanatomy) between dopaminergic and output neurons that creates different roles for specific neurons. Computational modelling shows that this circuit allows for rapid memory acquisition, transfer from short term to long term, and exploration/exploitation trade-off. The model can reproduce the observed changes in the activity of each of the identified neurons in conditioning paradigms and can be used for flexible behavioural control.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75611 | DOI Listing |
Biol Psychiatry
January 2025
Department of Psychology, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, TX, United States. Electronic address:
Background: Innovative treatments for paranoia, which significantly impairs social functioning in schizophrenia (SCZ), are urgently needed. The pathophysiology of paranoia implicates the amygdala-prefrontal (PFC) circuits; thus, this study systematically investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the ventrolateral PFC can attenuate paranoia and improve social functioning in SCZ.
Methods: A double-blind, within-subjects, crossover design was used to compare active vs.
PLoS Biol
January 2025
Department of Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Successful resolution of approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) is fundamentally important for survival, and its dysregulation is a hallmark of many neuropsychiatric disorders, and yet the underlying neural circuit mechanisms are not well elucidated. Converging human and animal research has implicated the anterior/ventral hippocampus (vHPC) as a key node in arbitrating AAC in a region-specific manner. In this study, we sought to target the vHPC CA1 projection pathway to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) to delineate its contribution to AAC decision-making, particularly in the arbitration of learned reward and punishment signals, as well as innate signals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioinformatics
January 2025
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, 02-106, Poland.
Motivation: It is a challenging task to decipher the mechanisms of a complex system from observational data; especially in biology, where systems are sophisticated, measurements coarse and multi-modality is a common trait. The typical approaches of inferring a network of relationships between system's components struggle with the quality and feasibility of estimation, as well as with the interpretability of the results they yield.Said issues can be avoided, however, when dealing with a simpler problem of tracking only the influence paths, defined as circuits relying the information of an experimental perturbation as it spreads through the system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElife
January 2025
Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Department of Neuronal Control of Metabolism, Cologne, Germany.
Orexin signaling in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra promotes locomotion and reward processing, but it is not clear whether dopaminergic neurons directly mediate these effects. We show that dopaminergic neurons in these areas mainly express orexin receptor subtype 1 (Ox1R). In contrast, only a minor population in the medial ventral tegmental area express orexin receptor subtype 2 (Ox2R).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommun Biol
January 2025
Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, 10029, USA.
Those with diabetes mellitus are at high-risk of developing psychiatric disorders, especially mood disorders, yet the link between hyperglycemia and altered motivation has not been thoroughly explored. Here, we characterized value-based decision-making behavior of a streptozocin-induced diabetic mouse model on Restaurant Row, a naturalistic neuroeconomic foraging paradigm capable of behaviorally capturing multiple decision systems known to depend on dissociable neural circuits. Mice made self-paced choices on a daily limited time-budget, accepting or rejecting reward offers based on cost (delays cued by tone pitch) and subjective value (flavors), in a closed-economy system tested across months.
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