Topic: compartmentalized neurons

Animals learn from experience the value of environmental stimuli and adjust their behavior accordingly. At the core of animal conditioning lies the capacity to associate a neural activity pattern induced by an unconditioned stimulus (US) with the pattern arising in response to a conditioned stimulus (CS). Reward-modulated associative synaptic plasticity has been successful in explaining conditioning when the neural representations of behavioral stimuli are unmixed. However, this assumption is inconsistent with the fact that neurons --- particularly in high-level, cognitive areas --- display mi