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DANDRITE Lecture

Armin Lak from University College London will give a talk on "The roles of dopamine in perceptual and economic decision making"

17.06.2016 | Susanne Schousboe Sjøgaard

Dato man 27 jun
Tid 09:15 10:00
Sted Auditorium 6 (building 1170-347), Aarhus University Dept. Biomedicine, Ole Worm’s Allé, 8000 Aarhus C

On June 27, Armin Lak, a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow from University College London will give a talk on "The roles of dopamine in perceptual and economic decision making".

Abstract

Dopamine neurons are known to reflect the economic value of rewards in form of reward prediction error signals. In this talk, I will describe experiments in which we investigated how dopamine signals emerge during learning of an economic choice task. I will then introduce a novel behavioural paradigm for probing perceptual decisions in mice, and present experiments in which we asked how optogenetic manipulation of dopamine neurons influences animals’ perceptual choices. Finally, I will discuss experiments in which we investigated whether dopamine-mediated changes in animal’s choice behaviour are reflected in the activity of brain regions that receive dopaminergic inputs. Together, these experiments demonstrate the nature of signals that dopaminergic cells represent during learning, diverse roles dopamine plays in various decision contexts, and finally how this neuromodulator influences neuronal computations in other brain structures.

Hosts:
Group leaders Sadegh Nabavi & Duda Kvitsiani, Dept. Molecular Biology and Genetics, DANDRITE - Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience, Aarhus University

Forskning, Neurocampus, Institut for Biomedicin, Videnskabelig medarbejder, Ph.d.-studerende, Institut for Folkesundhed, Forskningsårsstuderende, Institut for Klinisk Medicin, Mentalnet, iPSYCH