Ventral Tegmental Area dopamine projections to the hippocampus trigger long term potentiation and contextual learning
In most models, dopamine is not involved in the initiation but only in the long-term maintenance of LTP and memory. Conversely, we discovered that repeatedly stimulating Schaffer collaterals in concomitance with midbrain dopamine afferents to CA1 triggers hippocampal LTP. Moreover, we show that this dopamine pathway is involved in contextual learning. Thus, midbrain dopamine can play the role of a teaching signal triggering non-Hebbian LTP and allowing supervised learning.
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