Tag Archives: learning

Dopamine-making neurons, an ongoing mystery, play a bigger role in reinforcing learning than in initiating action

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Amber Dance

Deep in the midbrain, one type of neuron has two crucial jobs when it comes to acting while anticipating a reward—a state also known as Pavlovian conditioning. Called dopaminergic (DA) neurons, they can link a signal, such as a sound … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Neurons fire in sync, helping elucidate the biological basis of learning

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Amber Dance

Our brains change as we learn. But how exactly does a cluster of neurons change their activity or connections? It seems the phenomenon is due, at least in part, to neurons starting to fire in sync, according to a recent … Continue reading →

Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Neuroscience | Tagged learning, maze, memory, neurons, plasticity, prefrontal cortex, rat | Leave a comment

Journal Club: Researchers catch the mouse brain in the act of learning something new

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Amber Dance

Neurobiologists have captured, for the first time, the moment in a mouse’s brain when it first learns something new: in this case, that a beep signals a delicious droplet of sugar water. The results, recently reported in Nature Neuroscience, support a famous … Continue reading →