Topic: dorsal raphe

Visual attention enhances the neural representation of salient stimuli within the visual cortex. Although it is generally thought that this enhancement is driven by glutamatergic feedback from frontal cortical areas, cortically released neuromodulators are also believed to play a major uncharacterized role. Here we report the unexpected observation that dorsal raphe (DR) derived serotonin (5HT) controls visual attention. We adopted a behavioral model that captured how mice allocated attention to cued and uncued visual features. Simultaneous photometry recordings showed that DR activity decreas

The ability to extinguish fear responses to stimuli that no longer predict danger is critical for adaptive behavior and increases the likelihood of survival. During fear extinction, dopamine (DA) neurons signal the absence of the expected aversive outcome, and this extinction prediction error (EPE) signal is crucial for initiating and driving extinction learning. However, the neural circuits underlying the EPE signal have remained elusive. Here, we investigate the input-output circuitry of EPE-encoding DAneurons in male mice. By employing projection-specific fiber photometry and optogenetics,

We have revealed that there is a causal relationship between activation of dorsal raphe (DR) serotonergic neurons and patience when waiting for future rewards. To explain these behavioral data, we proposed a Bayesian decision model of waiting in which serotonin signals the prior probability of reward delivery. However, there is no direct evidence serotonin neural activity is modulated by reward probability. Five male serotonin neuron-specific GCaMP6-expressing mice were trained to perform a sequential tone-food waiting task that required them to wait for a delayed tone (tone delay: 0.3 s, tone

Contextual fear learning is a mental process, during which an originally neutral context becomes associated with a threat. Previous data have shown that one of the main controlling units of the defensive system, the central amygdala (CeA) is an active participant of contextual fear learning. Recently we showed that vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP)-expressing neurons in the periaqueductal gray and dorsal raphe that innervate the CeA play a role in contextual fear acquisition, but not in the recall. As the primary source of contextual information is the hippocampus, we aimed to uncover th