An investigation of the role of striatal dopamine in learning, motivation, habits and movement.

TY - THES

T1 - An investigation of the role of striatal dopamine in learning, motivation, habits and movement.

AU - van Elzelingen, Wouter

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Decades of research show dopamine's importance in motivated behavior and reward learning, yet ongoing debate persists over its precise role, reflecting a shift towards recognizing diverse, region-specific functions of dopamine across the striatum. This thesis utilizes fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) to study dopamine function in different striatal subregions of behaving animals, uncovering heterogeneous dopamine release across regions and a distinct reward prediction error (RPE) signal exclusively in the limbic portion. While dopamine in the nucleus accumbens core (NAC) encodes reward and aversion in opposite directions, it does not fully encode an aversive prediction error (APE). Furthermore, the thesis identifies general organizational principles of dopamine signaling, highlighting regional differences in expression, and discovers a neural determinant of habit formation, emphasizing the critical role of dorsomedial striatum (DMS) dopamine. Additionally, it demonstrates dopamine release in both ventromedial striatum (VMS) and dorsolateral striatum (DLS) during self-motivated movement initiation, independent of external motivational stimuli, and shows that acceleration during locomotion is not linearly related to changes in dopamine concentration.

AB - Decades of research show dopamine's importance in motivated behavior and reward learning, yet ongoing debate persists over its precise role, reflecting a shift towards recognizing diverse, region-specific functions of dopamine across the striatum. This thesis utilizes fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) to study dopamine function in different striatal subregions of behaving animals, uncovering heterogeneous dopamine release across regions and a distinct reward prediction error (RPE) signal exclusively in the limbic portion. While dopamine in the nucleus accumbens core (NAC) encodes reward and aversion in opposite directions, it does not fully encode an aversive prediction error (APE). Furthermore, the thesis identifies general organizational principles of dopamine signaling, highlighting regional differences in expression, and discovers a neural determinant of habit formation, emphasizing the critical role of dorsomedial striatum (DMS) dopamine. Additionally, it demonstrates dopamine release in both ventromedial striatum (VMS) and dorsolateral striatum (DLS) during self-motivated movement initiation, independent of external motivational stimuli, and shows that acceleration during locomotion is not linearly related to changes in dopamine concentration.

M3 - PhD thesis

ER -