A system-level model of noradrenergic function

Abstract

Neuromodulation is an interesting way to display different modes of functioning in a complex network. The effect of Noradrenaline has often been related to the exploration/exploitation trade-off and implemented in models by modulation of the gain of activation function. In this paper, we show that this mechanism is not sufficient for system-level networks and propose another way to implement it, exploiting reported inhibition of a striatal region by Noradrenaline. We describe here the corresponding model and report its performances in a reversal task.