Seminar · Behavioral Neuroscience
Dynamic dopaminergic signaling probabilistically controls the timing of self-timed movements
Allison Hamilos · Assad Lab, Harvard University
Wed, Feb 23, 2022 · 04:00 UTC
Human movement disorders and pharmacological studies have long suggested molecular dopamine modulates the pace of the internal clock. But how does the endogenous dopaminergic system influence the timing of our movements? We examined the relationship between dopaminergic signaling and the timing of reward-related, self-timed movements in mice. Animals were trained to initiate licking after a self-timed interval following a start cue; reward was delivered if the animal’s first lick fell within a rewarded window (3.3-7 s). The first-lick timing distributions exhibited the scalar property, and we