2026/06/12 by Megan A. Brickner, William E. Szot, Amy R. Wolff +2 · 1 voice
Medicine · Neuroscience · #Amygdala #Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder #Basolateral amygdala #Dopamine #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Midbrain #Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior #Salience (neuroscience)
paper · doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74226-2
published in Nature Communications 17(1) (Nature Portfolio)
openalex publication_date 2026/06/12 · openalex created_date 2026/06/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is important for assigning emotional weight to environmental stimuli to guide learning, discrimination, and adaptive vigilance. The contribution of neuromodulator inputs such as dopamine to this process is unclear. Here, we recorded in vivo BLA dopamine signals across emotional learning paradigms. We show that BLA dopamine scales with a stimulus’s emotional intensity, but not value or associative strength, and reward-predictive cues evoke BLA dopamine signals that diminish, rather than grow, with training. In a complex learning context, where rats discriminated between multiple valenced associations, the magnitude of cue-evoked BLA dopamine re-scaled to report the level of relative emotional saliency. Threat and safety cues prompted larger, sustained dopamine signals compared to reward and neutral cues. Together, our data reveal a pattern of dopamine encoding with a unique contribution to learning, for dynamic disambiguation of affective states. The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to support dynamic disambiguation of affective states.