Activities
Peter Dayan
Norepinephrine and Neural Interrupts*
The neuromodulator norepinephrine plays an important role in aspects of vigilance and attention. Extensive neurophysiological recordings show that noradrenergic neurons are activated on a phasic, sub-second time-scale by behaviorally relevant stimuli and contingencies within tasks. We model this activity as a neural interrupt signal that reports on unexpected changes of state within a task, and show that this offers a faithful characterization of a range of the neurophysiological data. We also discuss its relationship to existing theories suggesting norepinephrine reporting on uncertainty between tasks on a much longer time-scale of minutes and beyond. These theoretical characterizations are complementary and jointly offer a rich picture of a key neural signal.* Joint work with Angela Yu