Time: 14:45-15:45 on Mon.,Oct.9, 2023

Venue：E109,Biomedicine Hall

Speaker: Dr.Tao Yang

Host: Dr.Song-Hai Shi

Title: Plastic and stimulus-specific coding of salient events  in the central amygdala

Abstract：

The central amygdala (CeA) is implicated in a range of mental processes including attention, motivation, memory formation and extinction, and in behaviors driven by either aversive or  appetitive stimuli. How it participates in these divergent functions remains elusive. Here we show that somatostatin-expressing (Sst+) CeA neurons, which mediate much of CeA functions, generate experience-dependent and stimulus-specific evaluative signals essential for learning. The population responses of these neurons in mice encode the identities of a wide range of salient stimuli, with the responses of separate subpopulations selectively representing the stimuli that have contrasting valences, sensory modalities, or physical properties (e.g., shock and water reward). These signals scale with stimulus intensity, undergo pronounced amplification and transformation during learning, and are required for both reward and aversive learning. Notably, these signals contribute to dopamine neurons’ responses to reward and reward prediction error, but not to their responses to aversive stimuli. Consistently, Sst+ CeA neuron outputs to dopamine areas are required for reward learning, but are dispensable for aversive learning. Our results suggest that Sst+ CeA neurons selectively process information about differing salient events for evaluation during learning, supporting the diverse roles of the CeA. In particular, the information for dopamine neurons facilitates reward evaluation.

Biography：

Tao majored in electronic engineering in his undergraduate study in Xidian University. And he did Ph.D. study in Dr. Shaoqun Zeng’s laboratory at the National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, majored in Biomedical Photonics. Tao’s PhD work was to design a line-scanning strip imaging method with signal integration to achieve rapid fluorescence imaging of the entire mouse brain with high spatial sampling rate and high signal to noise ratio. After completing his Ph.D., with the fundamental knowledge about analog and digital signal processing in complex electronic systems, he became interested in how the brain processes information to form associations between surrounding environment and significant life events that enable us to adapt to the world accordingly. As a result, he switched to neuroscience and joined Dr. Bo Li’s Lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2016 and chose his postdoctoral project to study the role of the central amygdala (CeA), a brain region essential for generating emotions and forming associations, in divergent adaptive behaviors.