Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Hunger, thirst, loneliness and ambition determine the reward value of food, water, social interaction, and performance outcome. Dopamine (DA) neurons respond to rewards meeting these diverse needs, but it remains unclear how behavior and DA signals change as priorities change with new opportunities in the environment. One possibility is that DA signals for distinct drives are routed to distinct DA pathways. Another possibility is that DA signals in a given pathway are dynamically tuned to rewards set by the current priority. Here we used electrophysiology and fiber photometry to test how DA signals associated with quenching thirst, singing a good song, and courting a mate change as thirsty, lonely, and sexually motivated male songbirds were provided with opportunities to retrieve water, evaluate song performance, or court a female. When alone, water reward signals were observed in two mesostriatal pathways but singing-related performance error signals were routed to Area X, a striatal nucleus specialized for singing. When courting a female, the expression of thirst was reduced and DA responses to both water and song performance outcomes diminished. Instead, DA signals in Area X were driven by female calls timed with the courtship song. Thus the DA system handled coexisting drives in two ways: by routing vocal performance and social feedback signals to a striatal area for communication, and by flexibly re-tuning to rewards set by the prioritized drive.