Dopamine waves as a mechanism for spatiotemporal credit assignment.

Join the UC Irvine Center for Addiction Neuroscience in a virtual ICAN Seminar featuring Arif Hamid, PhD, from Brown University.

Abstract
Significant evidence supports the view that dopamine shapes reward-learning by encoding prediction errors. However, it is unknown whether dopamine decision-signals are tailored to the functional specialization of target regions. In this talk, I will report on a novel set of wave-like spatiotemporal activation patterns in dopamine axons (and release) across the dorsal striatum that switch between different activational motifs. At reward delivery, waves are altered by task demands, propagating from dorsomedial to dorsolateral striatum during instrumental contingencies, and in the opponent direction when rewards are independent of animal behavior. I will demonstrate that our results are consistent with a computational architecture in which striatal dopamine signals are sculpted by inference about agency, and provide evidence for a spatiotemporally “vectorized” role of dopamine in credit assignment directed toward specialized “expert” striatal subregions.