Vijay Namboodiri and Ali Mohebi on the evolving story of dopamine’s role in cognitive function

The classic story of dopamine’s role in learning is related to reward prediction errors—dopamine is modulated when you expect a reward and don’t get it, and when you don’t expect a reward but do get it. Vijay Mohan K. Namboodiri, assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, calls this a prospective account of dopamine function because it requires an animal to look into the future to expect a reward. Namboodiri has shown, however, that a retrospective account that links dopamine to how we understand causes and effects in our ongoing behaviors might better explain many known behavioral data.

In this episode, Namboodiri gives us a deep history lesson about dopamine, his newer story and why it has caused a bit of controversy, and how all of this came to be. Ali Mohebi, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discusses the broader role of dopamine in cognitive functions, its effects over different time scales and its role among the many other neurotransmitters swirling around our brains.

For more on this topic, check out:

• Reconstructing dopamine’s link to reward
• Dopamine and the need for alternative theories
• Does a new theory of dopamine replace the classic model?