Predictions help guide learning. As we encounter objects in our environment, we make predictions about their value. When outcomes match our predictions, learning is not required. When outcomes are unexpected, however, we ...

How is sensory information represented in the brain? A long-standing debate in neural coding is whether and how timing of spikes conveys information to downstream neurons. Although we know that neurons in the olfactory ...

Combining rabies-virus tracing, optical clearing (CLARITY), and whole-brain light-sheet imaging, we mapped the monosynaptic inputs to midbrain dopamine neurons projecting to different targets (different parts of the striatum, ...

Dopamine neurons are thought to signal reward prediction error, or the difference between actual and predicted reward. How dopamine neurons jointly encode this information, however, remains unclear. One possibility is that ...

Parenting is essential for the survival and wellbeing of mammalian offspring but we lack a circuit-level understanding of how distinct components of this behaviour are orchestrated. Here we investigate how Galanin-expressing ...

Dopamine is thought to regulate learning from appetitive and aversive events. Here we examined how optogenetically-identified dopamine neurons in the lateral ventral tegmental area of mice respond to aversive events in ...

Humans and other animals must often make decisions on the basis of imperfect evidence. Statisticians use measures such as P values to assign degrees of confidence to propositions, but little is known about how the brain ...

Dopamine has a central role in motivation and reward. Dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) signal the discrepancy between expected and actual rewards (that is, reward prediction error)1–3, but how they ...

Many animal species rely on chemical signals to extract ecologically important information from the environment. Yet in natural conditions chemical signals will frequently undergo concentration changes that produce differences ...

Odor stimulation evokes complex spatiotemporal activity in the olfactory bulb, suggesting that the identity of activated neurons as well as the timing of their activity convey information about odors. However, whether and ...