Title

Dopamine and Value over Time and Space

Bio

Josh Berke is the Schmid Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He received training at Cambridge (BA/MA), Harvard (PhD), NIH and Boston University (postdoc). He rose to Professor in Biopsychology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before joining UCSF in 2016 where among other roles he is Director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction. Dr. Berke’s work focuses on the behavioral and computational functions of cortical-basal ganglia circuits, and their modulation by dopamine.

Abstract

I will describe results from several recent experiments designed to better understand dopamine signals and their roles in learning and motivation. I will show how dopamine responses to reward-predictive cues signals reward prediction errors (RPEs) – consistent with conventional theory – but that the underlying reward prediction differs between target regions in a manner consistent with distinct scales of temporal processing. Furthermore, dopamine ramps up as animals approach reward, as if encoding reward predictions (values), rather than RPE. I will present results from a novel dynamic maze task, revealing how dopamine value signals are updated using both internal knowledge and propagation across space. Finally I will show our latest findings on how this dopamine release interacts with, is locally sculpted by, local acetylcholine release within striatal microcircuits.