Plastic and stimulus-specific coding of salient events in the central amygdala

Abstract

The central amygdala (CeA) is implicated in a range of mental processes including attention, motivation, memory formation and extinction, and in behaviors driven by either aversive or appetitive stimuli. How it participates in these divergent functions remains elusive. Here we show that somatostatin-expressing (Sst+) CeA neurons, which mediate much of CeA functions, generate experience-dependent and stimulus-specific evaluative signals essential for learning. The population responses of these neurons in mice encode the identities of a wide range of salient stimuli, with the responses of separate subpopulations selectively representing the stimuli that have contrasting valences, sensory modalities, or physical properties (e.g., shock and water reward). These signals scale with stimulus intensity, undergo pronounced amplification and transformation during learning, and are required for both reward and aversive learning. Notably, these signals contribute to dopamine neurons’ responses to reward and reward prediction error, but not to their responses to aversive stimuli. Consistently, Sst+ CeA neuron outputs to dopamine areas are required for reward learning, but are dispensable for aversive learning. Our results suggest that Sst+ CeA neurons selectively process information about differing salient events for evaluation during learning, supporting the diverse roles of the CeA. In particular, the information for dopamine neurons facilitates reward evaluation.