ArticleiScience2023
Cholinergic activity reflects reward expectations and predicts behavioral responses.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Striatal control of amygdalar acetylcholine release during salience-associated processing.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Neurons of the human subthalamic nucleus engage with local delta frequency processes during action cancellation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Most Ventral Pallidal Cholinergic Neurons Are Bursting Basal Forebrain Cholinergic Neurons with Mesocorticolimbic Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Glutamatergic projection neurons in the basal forebrain underlie learned olfactory associational valence assignments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Phenome-wide analysis of genetically imputed neuroimaging phenotypes reveals associations with psychiatric traits in a multi-ancestry cohort.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Modulation of speed-dependent acetylcholine release in the hippocampus by spatial task engagement.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Acetylcholine modulates prefrontal outcome coding during threat learning under uncertainty.eLife · 2025Article
- Abnormal response to chronic social defeat stress and fear extinction in a mouse model ofFrontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Extrinsic and intrinsic control of striatal cholinergic interneuron activity.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2025Review
- Vagus nerve stimulation recruits the central cholinergic system to enhance perceptual learning.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Parvalbumin-expressing basal forebrain neurons mediate learning from negative experience.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Potentiation of cholinergic and corticofugal inputs to the lateral amygdala in threat learning.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Cholinergic Reinforcement Signaling Is Impaired by Amyloidosis Prior to Its Synaptic Loss.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Chronic neuroinflammation during aging leads to cholinergic neurodegeneration in the mouse medial septum.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2023Article
- The behavioral signature of stepwise learning strategy in male rats and its neural correlate in the basal forebrain.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A cholinergic auditory pathway.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Basal forebrain cholinergic neurons (BFCNs) play an important role in associative learning, suggesting that BFCNs may participate in processing stimuli that predict future outcomes. However, the impact of outcome probabilities on BFCN activity remained elusive. Therefore, we performed bulk calcium imaging and recorded spiking of identified cholinergic neurons from the basal forebrain of mice performing a probabilistic Pavlovian cued outcome task. BFCNs responded more to sensory cues that were often paired with reward. Reward delivery also activated BFCNs, with surprising rewards eliciting a stronger response, whereas punishments evoked uniform positive-going responses. We propose that BFCNs differentially weigh predictions of positive and negative reinforcement, reflecting divergent relative salience of forecasting appetitive and aversive outcomes, partially explained by a simple reinforcement learning model of a valence-weighed unsigned prediction error. Finally, the extent of cue-driven cholinergic activation predicted subsequent decision speed, suggesting that the expectation-gated cholinergic firing is instructive to reward-seeking behaviors.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.