Dopamine and serotonin’s roles in rapid perception discovered

The neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin are involved in perception, working at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action, finds a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The findings, published in Neuron , demonstrate for the first time in humans that two neurochemicals best known for their roles in reward processing also integrate people's perceptions of the world with their actions. With their discovery, the UK-US research team demonstrated that it is possible to continually and simultaneously measure the activity of both dopamine and serotonin -whose receptor and uptake sites are therapeutic targets for disorders ranging from depression to Parkinson's disease - in the human brain. Lead author Dr Dan Bang (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. "We've thought that dopamine and serotonin at these fast time scales are solely involved in reward processing - or how good or how bad an outcome is after taking an action. What we show here is that these neuromodulators play a much broader role in supporting human behaviour and thought, and in particular that they are involved in how we process the outside world. "For example, if you move through a room and the lights are off, you move differently because you're uncertain about where objects are.