WIN Wednesday Seminar, Neurophysiology of dynamic decision making by Jeremiah Cohen
To join this seminar online, please see https://sharepoint.nexus.ox.ac.uk/sites/NDCN/FMRIB/SitePages/WIN%20Wednesday%20Meeting%20Details.aspx
Decisions take place in dynamic environments. The nervous system must continually learn the best actions to obtain rewards. In the theoretical framework of optimal control and reinforcement learning, behavioral policies are updated by feedback arising from errors in the predicted reward. These reward prediction errors have been mapped to dopamine neurons in the midbrain, but it is unclear how the decision variables that generate policies themselves are represented and modulated. We trained mice on a dynamic foraging task, in which they freely chose between two alternatives that delivered reward with changing probabilities. We found that corticostriatal neurons, in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), maintained persistent changes in firing rates that represented relative and total action values over long timescales. These are consistent with control signals used to drive flexible behavior. We next recorded from serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe, to test the hypothesis that their signals could be used to modulate dynamic learning. We found that serotonin neurons represented a quantity related to reward uncertainty over long timescales (tens of seconds), consistent with a modulatory signal used to adjust learning of ongoing decision variables. Our results provide a quantiative link between serotonin neuron activity and behavior.
Date:
1 December 2021, 14:00
Venue:
Venue to be announced
Speaker:
Jeremiah Y. Cohen (Johns Hopkins University)
Organising department:
Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences
Organiser:
Nancy Rawlings (University of Oxford)
Part of:
WIN Wednesdays Seminar Series
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editors:
Nancy Rawlings,
Andrew Galloway
