Climbing fibers encode a temporal-difference prediction error during cerebellar learning in mice

Climbing fiber inputs to Purkinje cells are thought to be involved in generating the instructive signals that drive cerebellar learning. To investigate how these instructive signals are encoded, we recorded the activity of individual climbing fibers during cerebellum-dependent eyeblink conditioning in mice. We found that climbing fibers signaled both the unexpected delivery and the unexpected omission of the periocular airpuff that served as the instructive signal for eyeblink conditioning. In addition, we observed that climbing fibers activated by periocular airpuffs also responded to stimuli from other sensory modalities if those stimuli were novel or if they predicted that the periocular airpuff was about to be presented. This pattern of climbing fiber activity is markedly similar to the responses of dopamine neurons during reinforcement learning, which have been shown to encode a particular type of instructive signal known as a temporal difference prediction error.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Nature Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2015-11-09

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/nn.4167PMID 26551541PMCID 4754078
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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