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Hiroyuki Nakahara
Lab for Integrated Theoretical Neuroscience, RIKEN Brain Science Institute
Tuesday 22 January 2008
16.00
Seminar Room B10 (Basement)
Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR
Dopamine neural response as context-dependent prediction error, and functional clusters underlying neural avalanches
I present two topics in this talk. As the first topic, I discuss our finding that dopamine (DA) neurons can represent context-dependent prediction error. It indicates that DA neurons can take account of a specific type of conditional probability of reward, based on a history of trials, which has been acquired through months’ experience of experimental tasks. This suggests that DA neurons represent reward prediction error, partially at least, by incorporating a kind of model-based reinforcement learning. As the second topic, I discuss our preliminary result on the analysis of local field potential (LFP) data in which neural avalanche, or a power-law statistics, has been found. We show that the pairwise interaction of the LFPs can be accounted mostly by the activity of functional clusters (groups of electrodes). This suggests that the functional clusters may underlie the generation of neural avalanche.