Item Details

title

EXAMINING THE DOPAMINERGIC MODULATION OF HUMAN TIME PERCEPTION USING PARKINSON’S DISEASE AS A MODEL

author

DiMarco, Emily

abstract

Decades of research utilizing both model organisms and humans has implicated midbrain dopamine in behaviors related to time perception. It remains unclear, however, how dopamine may be acting to modulate human timing. The experiments presented in this dissertation explore the role of midbrain dopamine in human time perception utilizing patients with Parkinson’s disease as a model. Parkinson’s disease results from the loss of midbrain dopamine neurons, and therefore serves to model how low dopamine availability may be affecting timing behaviors. Specifically, the first chapter of this work aims to quantitatively characterize differences in how patients with Parkinson’s disease perceive time and describes how these differences in timing behavior can be used to predict individual clinical symptoms of patients. The subsequent chapters aim to address how dopamine may be acting to modulate these timing behaviors. Chapter 3 describes the role of instrumental conditioning in time perception and demonstrates how it may relate to temporal learning processes. Evidence is presented that temporal learning in the context of reinforcement may be driven by reward prediction error signaling, and therefore, may be explained by dopaminergic signaling during reinforcement learning. Chapter 4 aims to directly test this hypothesized role of dopamine in temporal learning through the application of human voltammetry to measure subsecond dopamine concentrations from patients with Parkinson’s disease. The results of this experiment directly associate changes in dopamine concentrations with temporal learning from reinforcement. In sum, this work extends our knowledge of how dopamine modulates human time perception and its related behaviors by revealing that timing may be mediated by dopaminergic signals that reinforce learning. It lays a foundation for future work to explore how current leading theories of what dopamine encodes – specifically temporal difference reinforcement learning theory – may be able to describe how humans perceive time.

subject

Dopamine

Learning

Parkinson's disease

Reinforcement

Time

contributor

Kishida, Kenneth T (advisor)

Haq, Ihtsham U (committee member)

Terhune, Devin B (committee member)

Tatter, Stephen B (committee member)

date

2024-09-13T08:36:36Z (accessioned)

2024 (issued)

degree

Neuroscience (discipline)

embargo

2025-09-12 (terms)

2025-09-12 (liftdate)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109853 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Dissertation