#3: Zebra Finches Reward Themselves for singing well

The #3 post so far this year explored how zebra finches reward themselves for singing well:

Dopamine is an important hormone released from neurons involved in reward pathways. Researchers at Cornell University wanted to know if dopamine signaling was involved in how birds learn songs. Their findings, recently published in Science, present evidence that neurons in the brain of zebra finches do in fact decrease dopamine signals when the birds hear an error in their song in comparison to when they sing 'correctly'. The researchers also found that dopamine signaling was enhanced  when the birds corrected a mistake made during a prior attempt.  

Sources:

V. Gadagkar, P.A. Puzerey, R. Chen, E. Baird-Daniel, A.R. Farhang, J.H. Goldberg. Dopamine neurons encode performance error in singing birds. Science, 354:1278-82, 2016.

The Scientist

Video from YouTube

More like this

In a 2006 Psychopharmacology article, Niv et al.
Dopamine is probably the most studied neurotransmitter, and yet the neuroscience literature contains a huge variety of perspectives on its functional role.
I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The article isn't bad.
Today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association contains a study that employed PET scans to determine the effect of modafinil upon dopamine concentration and reuptake in the human central nervous system.  They conclude with a caution that clinicians