Mihaela D. Iordanova

TL;DR: It is shown that optogenetically shunting dopamine activity at the start of a reward-predicting cue prevents second-order conditioning without affecting blocking, indicating that cue-evoked transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions.

TL;DR: These results, using a novel combination of behavioural assays, provide clear support for the view that patterns of stimulation can be encoded either elementally or configurally, and that disruption of hippocampal function leaves rats reliant on elemental processes.

TL;DR: It is shown, for the first time, that NMDA receptors in the rat hippocampus are required for retrieval-mediated learning involving episodes, but not for the expression of such learning or for retrieve- mediated learning involving simple associations between the components of episodes.

TL;DR: These experiments used blocking and unblocking designs to study the role of opioid receptors in the nucleus accumbens (Acb) in predictive fear learning to show that the Acb mediates attentional selection between competing predictors of motivationally significant events to enable learning about the best predictor of such events at the expense of worse predictors