The identified dopamine neurons were inhibited by the aversive stimulus.
The VTA is a nucleus in the midbrain where dopamine neurons are located.
Tye and her colleagues found that when mice were housed together, dopamine neurons in the DRN were relatively inactive.
Reward coding theories predict that dopamine neurons will be inhibited by or will not respond to aversive stimuli.
This result supports the notion that midbrain dopamine neurons are coding for both primitive and cognitive rewards.
As it happens, when colored targets were presented individually, the dopamine neurons responded more strongly to the informative target than the random target.
Using tissue from mouse embryos, researchers prepared brain cultures using conditions that favor the slowly progressing loss of dopamine neurons, a hallmark of the disease.
