Neuromodulation of hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity

Multiple neuromodulators including acetylcholine, noradrenaline, dopamine and serotonin are released in response to uncertainty to focus attention on events where the predicted outcome does not match observed reality. In these situations, internal representations need to be updated, a process that requires long-term synaptic plasticity. Through a variety of common and divergent mechanisms, it is recently shown that all these neuromodulators facilitate the induction and/or expression of long-term synaptic plasticity within the hippocampus. Under physiological conditions, this may be critical for suprathreshold induction of plasticity endowing neuromodulators with a gating function and providing a mechanism by which neuromodulators enable the targeted updating of memory with relevant information to improve the accuracy of future predictions.