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Basal forebrain (BF), a key cortically-projecting neuromodulatory system, has emerged as an increasingly important topic in recent years for its role in cognitive functions. While studies of the BF have traditionally focused on its cholinergic neurons, noncholinergic BF neurons are anatomically more prominent yet functionally poorly understood, and represent an unexplored area of research with lots of potential. Recent studies from my lab highlight the important role of a specific group of noncholinergic neurons (referred to as BF bursting neurons) as a key neural mechanism in attention and reward-based decision making. In this presentation, I will highlight three ongoing projects. First, using a cross-modal selective attention task in which attention is rapidly switched between sensory modalities, we showed that BF bursting neurons respond to stimuli in the attended modality only. Shifts in BF response patterns were rapid and tightly coupled with behavioral switching in single trials. Second, we discovered a novel functional coupling between VTA DA neurons and BF bursting neurons in their encoding of reward prediction error. Furthermore, DA neurons play a causal role and robustly drive the spiking activity in BF bursting neurons with a latency of 10 msec. Third, we identified novel candidate markers for BF bursting neurons, and found that both the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) are key downstream targets. Consistent with this anatomical projection pattern, the activity of BF bursting neurons is coupled with LFP responses in both PFC and TRN in single trials. Together, these observations support the idea that BF bursting neurons serve as an interface between reward prediction and attentional modulation, by converting the encoding of reward prediction error into the rapid amplification of activities in the PFC and thalamus.