What does dopamine mean?
Open accessAbstract
Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem: how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move? It is often presumed that motivation involves slow ('tonic') dopamine changes, while fast ('phasic') dopamine fluctuations convey reward prediction errors for learning. Yet recent studies have shown that dopamine conveys motivational value and promotes movement even on subsecond timescales. Here I describe an alternative account of how dopamine regulates ongoing behavior. Dopamine release related to motivation is rapidly and locally sculpted by receptors on dopamine terminals, independently from dopamine cell firing. Target neurons abruptly switch between learning and performance modes, with striatal cholinergic interneurons providing one candidate switch mechanism. The behavioral impact of dopamine varies by subregion, but in each case dopamine provides a dynamic estimate of whether it is worth expending a limited internal resource, such as energy, attention, or time.
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DA neurotransmission is essential for diverse behavioral outputs, including motivation, cognition, reward learning, decision making, salience attribution, and voluntary motor control.
“DA neurotransmission is essential for diverse behavioral outputs, including motivation, cognition, reward learning, decision making, salience attribution, and voluntary motor control [121–127].”
From Adolescent nicotine exposure and persistent neurocircuitry changes: unveiling lifelong psychiatric risks (2025) · cites this paper as [127]
The sections on striatal resource allocation and decision-making describe dopamine’s roles in movement, attention, cognitive control, and choices; the learning-and-motivation section also supports those two roles. But the claim that dopamine neurotransmission is essential for every listed output is broader than the paper supports: the resource-allocation section explicitly says mesolimbic dopamine is not required for a simple reward-seeking action, and its account of several other roles is framed as a proposal. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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“Dopaminergic signaling in the NAc has been widely studied for its involvement in motivational salience, behavioral reinforcement, and reward prediction error encoding (Schultz et al., 2015; Berridge and Robinson, 2016; Watabe- Uchida et al., 2017; Berke, 2018).”
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- Authors
- Berke, J. D.
- Affiliations
- University of California, San Francisco (US)
- Corresponding author
- Berke, Joshua D.
- ORCID
- Berke, Joshua D.
- Venue
- Nature Neuroscience
- Published
- 2018-05-14
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 787-793
- ISSN
- 1097-6256 (ISSN-L)
- 1546-1726
- PMC
- PMC6358212
- OpenAlex
- W2799652277
- Cited by
- 904
- References
- 100
- Citations by year
- 2026: 80 · 2025: 116 · 2024: 129 · 2023: 126 · 2022: 122 · 2021: 121 · 2020: 103 · 2019: 71 · 2018: 34 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 10.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH101697)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA045783)
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS078435)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
- Keywords
- dopamine, motivation, learning, reward prediction error, phasic dopamine, tonic dopamine, striatal cholinergic interneurons, dopaminergic terminals, energy allocation, striatum
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Dopamine, Humans, Learning, Motivation, Signal Transduction, Dopaminergic Neurons
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