Topic: signal detection task

Understanding how the brain represents, updates, and accommodates uncertainty is a key challenge for computational neuroscience. Neuromodulators such as acetylcholine (ACh) have been suggested as playing important roles over multiple timescales, regulating excitability and plasticity to mediate various effects of uncertainty on inference and learning. While these influences are consistent with ACh's long-standing association with general functions of attention and arousal, recent studies using novel techniques to measure and manipulate this system with increasing exactitude have revealed intri

The mammalian striatum is critically involved in perceptual decision-making, where disrupted dopamine transmission leads to perceptual disturbances such as hallucinations. The precise mechanism by which striatal dopamine contributes to perceptual decisions is not known. We investigated this by developing a circuit model in which perceptual learning and value learning are implemented in parallel corticostriatal loops to inform action selection. Previous models of corticostriatal plasticity have focused primarily on how reward prediction errors signaled by dopamine enable value learning in the v

Cholinergic dysfunction contributes to attentional deficits in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and dementia. Cortical cholinergic inputs are fundamentally linked to attention and phasic acetylcholine (Ach) release causally mediates performance in tasks involving monitoring for cues, cue detection, and cue-directed responding.We investigated the role of muscarinic and nicotinic ACh receptors (mAChRs and nAChRs) in attentional performance by applying systemic manipulations in adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats during the Signal Detection Task. In this task,