Topic: anticipatory licking

Adaptive behavior is guided by dynamic evaluations of the reward environment, which can be influenced by factors like reward frequency and internal motivational state. We implemented a behavioral task in water deprived headfixed mice that included fluctuating probabilities of reward following auditory stimuli. Mice adjusted their anticipatory licking, a proxy for reward expectation, according to both the recent reward rate and their diminishing motivation for reward. We developed a reinforcement learning model that revealed the synergistic impacts of recent reward history, overall reward rate,

Associative learning relies on the contingency between stimuli and outcomes, yet the neural mechanisms instantiating contingency remain unclear. We investigated dopamine activity in the ventral striatum of mice performing a Pavlovian contingency degradation task. Both anticipatory licking behavior and dopamine responses to a conditioned stimulus diminished when additional rewards were delivered without cues (uncued) but remained consistent when the same additional rewards were paired with a new cue. These findings challenge traditional contingency-based accounts and the recent causal learning

We aimed to investigate the role of dopamine (DA), acetylcholine (ACh), norepinephrine (NE) and serotonin (5-HT) in associative learning and the correlation of their release with the reward prediction error (RPE). To address this, we trained mice on a sound detection Pavlovian conditioning task with a 50% reward schedule that allowed examining clean representations of postivite (rewarded trials) and negative RPE (reward omission trials), while we measured DA, ACh, NE and 5-HT release by fiber photometry. Behavioral updating of value representations based on the outcome of the previous trial wa