Neurophysiological Principles of Reward
Across species, dopamine is critical for encoding learned associations. Although recent advances in connectomics and single-cell transcriptomics have provided key information about the neural architecture and molecular features of individual dopaminergic neurons, what remains to be understood are the physiological principles governing dopaminergic neurons on an equivalent single neuron level. In my talk, I will present recent work on a small subset of dopaminergic neurons in the fly brain—the α1-dopaminergic neurons, which encode food reward memories. Using dual in-vivo whole-cell patch clamp recordings across these neurons and their postsynaptic partners, we reveal new insights into the molecular and network-level mechanisms of reward encoding. I will discuss how single-cell physiological properties shape activity patterns, and how coordinated activity across this network supports flexible computations critical for learning.