Pre-existing visual responses in a projection-defined dopamine population explain individual learning trajectories

Abstract

Learning a new task is challenging because the world is high dimensional, with only a subset of features being reward-relevant. What neural mechanisms contribute to initial task acquisition, and why do some individuals learn a new task much more quickly than others? To address these questions, we recorded longitudinally from dopamine (DA) axon terminals in mice learning a visual task. Across striatum, DA responses tracked idiosyncratic and side-specific learning trajectories. However, even before any rewards were delivered, contralateral-side-specific visual responses were present in DA terminals only in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS). These pre-existing responses predicted the extent of learning for contralateral stimuli. Moreover, activation of these terminals improved contralateral performance. Thus, the initial conditions of a projection-specific and feature-specific DA signal help explain individual learning trajectories. More broadly, this work implies that functional heterogeneity across DA projections serves to bias target regions towards learning about different subsets of task features, providing a mechanism to address the dimensionality of the initial task learning problem.