Optimal learning: a route to depression?

Despite their epidemiological importance, psychiatric diseases are only poorly understood. Nevertheless, judging by the efficacy of pharmacological treatments, most appear to involve characteristic dysfunctions of the dopaminergic (DA), serotonergic (5HT) and/or noradrenergic neuromodulatory systems that are the foci of intense computational neuroscience studies. We seek to use this tie to provide a link from normative neuromodulatory models to psychiatric dysfunction, here in particular in the context of extensively validated animal models of depression.