Topic: acetylcholine (ACh)

Understanding how the brain represents, updates, and accommodates uncertainty is a key challenge for computational neuroscience. Neuromodulators such as acetylcholine (ACh) have been suggested as playing important roles over multiple timescales, regulating excitability and plasticity to mediate various effects of uncertainty on inference and learning. While these influences are consistent with ACh's long-standing association with general functions of attention and arousal, recent studies using novel techniques to measure and manipulate this system with increasing exactitude have revealed intri

The striatum intricately regulates motor and cognitive functions through the dynamic interplay of dopamine (DA), acetylcholine (ACh), and intrinsic neuronal firing, bearing profound implications for disorders like Parkinson's. However, the interaction between striatal DA and ACh, and their collective impact on striatal neuron activity in health and disease, are not fully understood. This study aims to elucidate the complex interplay between ACh, DA, and neuronal activity in the striatum during sensory and motor events. Utilizing a specialized Delayed-Go reaching task for head-fixed mice, we re

Adaptive behavior in a dynamically changing environment requires learning the value of actions, and updating these values in response to changes in the environment. Several studies have investigated the role of the striatum, and its key neuromodulators, dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine (Ach), in this process. However, these studies usually investigated these neuromodulatory signals in animals which had undergone extensive pre-training, and were thus experts at flexibly adapting to new action values. In addition, most of these studies did not explore the dynamics of these signals simultaneously,