"Social Gating of dopaminergic error signals" - Progress in Neuroscience Seminar Series (PINS)

Jesse Goldberg, MD,PhD, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior Abstract: Attending to mistakes while practicing alone provides opportunities for learning, but self-evaluation during audience-directed performance could distract from ongoing execution. It remains unknown how animals switch between practice and performance modes, and how evaluation systems process errors across distinct performance contexts. We recorded from striatal-projecting dopamine (DA) neurons as male songbirds transitioned from singing alone to singing female-directed courtship song. In the presence of the female, singing-related performance error signals were reduced or gated off and DA neurons were instead phasically activated by female vocalizations. Mesostriatal DA neurons can thus dynamically change their tuning with changes in social context. Publications: Chen R and Goldberg JH. Actor Critic Reinforcement Learning in the Songbird. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 2020 Sep 5;65:1-9.Gadagkar V, Puzerey P, Chen R, Baird-Daniel E, Farhang A, Goldberg JH. Dopamine neurons encode performance error in singing birds. Science. 2016 Dec 9;354(6317):1278-1282. Bollu T,* Ito B*, Whitehead SC, Kardon B, Liu MH, Goldberg JH. Cortex-dependent corrections as the tongue reaches for and misses targets. Nature. 2021 Jun;594(7861):82-87.