Ventral tegmental area dopamine projections to the hippocampus trigger long-term potentiation and contextual learning.

In most models of neuronal plasticity and memory, dopamine is thought to promote the long-term maintenance of Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) underlying memory processes, but not the initiation of plasticity or new information storage. Here, we used optogenetic manipulation of midbrain dopamine neurons in male DAT::Cre mice, and discovered that stimulating the Schaffer collaterals - the glutamatergic axons connecting CA3 and CA1 regions - of the dorsal hippocampus concomitantly with midbrain dopamine terminals within a 200 millisecond time-window triggers LTP at glutamatergic synapses. Moreover, we showed that the stimulation of this dopaminergic pathway facilitates contextual learning in awake behaving mice, while its inhibition hinders it. Thus, activation of midbrain dopamine can operate as a teaching signal that triggers NeoHebbian LTP and promotes supervised learning.

A cognitive account of trace conditioning in insects.

Trace conditioning is a form of Pavlovian learning in which the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US) are separated by a temporal gap. Insects learn trace associations of variable nature (appetitive, aversive) and involving CSs of different sensory modalities (olfactory, visual). The accessibility of the insect neural system in behaving animals allowed identifying neural processes driving trace conditioning: the existence of prolonged neural responses to the CS after stimulus offset and the anticipation of US responses during the free-stimulus gap. Specific brain structures, such as the mushroom bodies seem to be allocated to this learning form. Here, we posit that a further component facilitating trace conditioning in insects relates to neuromodulatory mechanisms underlying enhanced attention. We thus propose a model based on different types of mushroom-body neurons, which provides a cognitive account of trace conditioning in insects.

Flies maintain idiosyncratic learning proficiency across odor-discrimination tasks.

Although insects of a same species appear similar when seen through human eyes, they exhibit considerable differences in behavioral performances, including learning success in conditioning tasks. New work on olfactory conditioning in fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster shows that these insects vary in their idiosyncratic learning proficiency and that this proficiency is consistent across days and variants of the trained task, thus uncovering the existence of different learning profiles within groups of flies.

Neuroscience: Mechanisms for bridging stimuli in Pavlovian trace conditioning in flies.

A recent study revealed neural mechanisms underlying visual trace conditioning in flies. To associate visual stimuli with heat punishment, the activity of visual- and heat-processing circuits was extended into the gap between them. Distractors delivered during the gap disrupted learning, raising the question of the cognitive processes at play.