Topic: expected uncertainty

Animals must continually assess their uncertainty about their environment and future events in order to drive choice behavior and learning. Because uncertainty is a key decision variable for myriad behaviors (e.g. curiosity, attention), neuromodulatory systems, which engage and regulate diverse brain regions and brain states, are ideally suited to subserve uncertainty-guided modulation of local brain computations. Theoretical studies have hypothesized that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is responsible for encoding “expected uncertainty” in the brain (i.e., learned unreliability of predictive

In volatile environments, humans and animals face different forms of uncertainty to which they must adapt to thrive. However, our understanding of the neural basis of this adaptation is incomplete, despite, for instance, long-standing arguments about its possible dependence on neuromodulation. Here, we take advantage of the well-known spatial remapping of hippocampal place cells in the face of environmental change to interrogate these processes. We performed calcium imaging in CA1 place cells using a new Uncertain Reward virtual reality Task (URTask), in which mice run along a linear track and