Project Grant R01DA060229

This Project Grant awarded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), provides $613,017 in funding to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to conduct research on the neurobiological mechanisms linking reinforcement learning and timing.

The key objectives of this 5-year research project are to: 1) Examine how the temporal precision of dopamine (DA) reward omission signals and striatal neural dynamics change across learning, 2) Determine if DA and striatal dynamics mutually influence each other's temporal coding properties, and 3) Develop computational models to describe the experimental results and propose a unified framework for understanding the mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning and timing. The project will use a combination of experimental and computational approaches, including measuring and perturbing DA and striatal activity in mice engaged in classical conditioning tasks. The findings are expected to advance scientific understanding of the neural circuit mechanisms that link reward-guided learning and temporal processing.