title: Dopaminergic impact on local and global cortical circuit processing during learning.
abstract: We have learned to detect, predict and behaviorally respond to important changes in our environment on short and longer time scales. Therefore, brains of humans and higher animals build upon a perceptual and semantic salience stored in their memories mainly generated by associative reinforcement learning. Functionally, the brain needs to extract and amplify a small number of features of sensory input with behavioral relevance to a particular situation in order to guide behavior. In this review, I argue that dopamine action, particularly in sensory cortex, orchestrates layer-dependent local and long-range cortical circuits integrating sensory associated bottom-up and semantically relevant top-down information, respectively. Available evidence reveals that dopamine thereby controls both the selection of perceptually or semantically salient signals as well as feedback processing from higher-order areas in the brain. Sensory cortical dopamine thereby governs the integration of selected sensory information within a behavioral context. This review proposes that dopamine enfolds this function by temporally distinct actions on particular layer-dependent local and global cortical circuits underlying the integration of sensory, and non-sensory cognitive and behavioral variables.
authors.affiliation: Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, D-39118 Magdeburg, Germany; Institute of Biology, Otto-von-Guericke-University, D-39120 Magdeburg, Germany. Electronic address: mhappel@lin-magdeburg.de.
authors.forename: Max F K
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Happel
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001519:Behavior; D001921:Brain / Q000378:metabolism*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology; D004298:Dopamine / Q000378:metabolism*; D005246:Feedback; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology
chemical_list: D004298:Dopamine
keywords: Behavior; Cortical circuits; Corticocortical processing; Dopamine; Learning; Sensory cortex