{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"institution":[{"name":"bioRxiv"}],"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,30]],"date-time":"2026-09-30T04:00:26Z","timestamp":1790740826578,"version":"4.1.0"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,19]]},"group-title":"Neuroscience","reference-count":63,"publisher":"openRxiv","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,19]],"date-time":"2026-03-19T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1773878400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"award":["2024-08-038"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024-08-038"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/00her7k05","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["31146"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["31146"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/03a63f080","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["R21AG088596"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["R21AG088596"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/001d55x84","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,25]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>ABSTRACT<\/jats:title>\n                <jats:p>The striatum integrates dopamine and acetylcholine to support learning and behavioral flexibility, yet how these neuromodulators coordinate during associative learning remains unclear. Using longitudinal dual-color fiber photometry in mice, we simultaneously tracked both signals in the anterior dorsolateral striatum throughout Pavlovian conditioning. We find that learning recruits distinct forms of neuromodulatory plasticity: dopamine maintains rapid, contingency-dependent cue responses, whereas acetylcholine undergoes broader reorganization across training. Despite these differences, trial-by-trial covariance between the two signals converges onto a compact low-dimensional structure that reliably captures learned behavioral state and distinguishes associative learning from sensory exposure alone. Granger causality analyses further reveal a directional asymmetry, present in both paired and unpaired mice, whereby dopamine reliably predicts subsequent acetylcholine fluctuations, with only weak reciprocal prediction. Together, our results identify a low-dimensional organizational principle for dopamine\u2013acetylcholine interactions, and suggest that dopamine acts as a leading temporal signal that shapes cholinergic dynamics during striatal learning.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.03.17.712528","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,19]],"date-time":"2026-03-19T16:30:13Z","timestamp":1773937813000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Coordinated yet asymmetric striatal neuromodulatory dynamics encode associative learning"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"given":"Min Jung","family":"Kim","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Blvd., Dallas, TX, 75390"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yang","family":"Yang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas, Southwestern 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