Heterozygous Nf1 knockout mice exhibit distinct dopaminergic phenotypes in vivo, as revealed by the genetically encoded dopamine sensor dLight1, patch clamp electrophysiology, optogenetics, and novel viral tools for morphological analysis.
Dopamine modulates behavioral measures of learning and pleasantness in a learning task guided by intrinsic reward, inducing long-term memory benefits specially in those participants with a high sensitivity to reward.
Dopamine signaling gradually causes long-lasting changes in fine motor coordination that can later be activated by acute changes in dopamine neuron activity.
Dopamine signals in the ventral, dorsomedial, and dorsolateral striatum are modulated by various variables, such as stimulus-associated value, choice, confidence, but these modulations can be inclusively explained by TD errors.
Dopamine, a reward signal in the brain, can retroactively convert hippocampal synaptic depression into potentiation, suggesting an elegant biological solution to the distal reward problem.
Dopamine novelty signals are localized in the posterior tail of the striatum along with general salience signals, while dopamine in the ventral striatum reliably encodes reward prediction error.