Glutamate cotransmission predicts the behavioral functions and characteristics of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA.

Using a novel intersectional genetic strategy for sparse neuronal labeling, Grossouw, Heijmink, et al. reconstruct individual midbrain dopamine neurons throughout development, adulthood, and degeneration. They reveal previously unrecognized morphological diversity, developmental wiring principles, and subtype-specific connectivity, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding how dopaminergic circuits are assembled, maintained, and disrupted.

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

Sleep not only makes us feel better, but it’s vital for helping us form memories and learn new skills. For many years, neuroscientists have studied how the brain consolidates episodic memories during ...

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

Nature Communications - Neural mechanisms underlying the ability to identify salient events are not fully understood. This study identifies the superior colliculus as a key brain region that...

Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

Perceptual decisions are shaped by expectations about sensory stimuli and rewards, learned through sensory and reward prediction errors. Dopamine is known to convey reward prediction errors that shape...

The Laboratory of Cortical Information Processing | Vision to Action at NERF (www.nerf.be) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow or PhD Student to work on a new research project funded by the...

Corticostriatal pathways are essential for a multitude of motor, sensory, cognitive, and affective functions. They are mediated by cortical pyramidal …

Significance The combination of two-photon calcium imaging and two-photon optogenetic stimulation, termed all-optical interrogation, provides spatial and temporal precision when recording and manipula...

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in learning by acting as a teaching signal to update the brain's predictions about rewards. A leading theory proposes that this process is analogous to...

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Bukwich and Campbell et al. show that mice integrate elapsed time and reward intake, scaled by a latent patience variable, to decide when to leave virtual “patches.” Frontal cortex ramping activity ma...

Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

Single-cell long-read RNA sequencing enables the high-fidelity mapping of single-cell expression data from highly sequence-similar transposable elements to unique genomic loci by correcting errors fro...

While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cortical GABAergic synapses remains less well underst...