Working with colleagues at UC San Diego (Department of Physics and Section of Neurobiology) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, Foo investigated whether mice are in fact aware that these impulses–documented in the lab through molecular and optical imaging techniques–are actually occurring.
‘Apart from being a ‘feel good’ brain messenger, the spontaneous impulses of dopamine in mice have shown that’
The researchers devised a feedback scheme in which mice on a treadmill received a reward if they showed they were able to control the impromptu dopamine signals. Not only were mice aware of these dopamine impulses, the data revealed, but the results confirmed that they learned to anticipate and volitionally act upon a portion of them.
“Critically, mice learned to reliably elicit (dopamine) impulses prior to receiving a reward,” the researchers note in the paper. “These effects reversed when the reward was removed. We posit that spontaneous dopamine impulses may serve as a salient cognitive event in behavioral planning.”
The researchers say the study opens a new dimension in the study of dopamine and brain dynamics. They now intend to extend this research to explore if and how unpredictable dopamine events drive foraging, which is an essential aspect of seeking sustenance, finding a mate and as a social behavior in colonizing new home bases.
“We further conjecture that an animal’s sense of spontaneous dopamine impulses may motivate it to search and forage in the absence of known reward-predictive stimuli,” the researchers noted.
Source: Medindia
