Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Phasic dopamine transmission is posited to act as a critical teaching signal that updates the stored (or "cached") values assigned to reward-predictive stimuli and actions. It is widely hypothesized that these cached values determine the selection among multiple courses of action, a premise that has provided a foundation for contemporary theories of decision making. In the current work we used fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to probe dopamine-associated cached values from cue-evoked dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens of rats performing cost-benefit decision-making paradigms to evaluate critically the relationship between dopamine-associated cached values and preferences. By manipulating the amount of effort required to obtain rewards of different sizes, we were able to bias rats toward preferring an option yielding a high-value reward in some sessions and toward instead preferring an option yielding a low-value reward in others. Therefore, this approach permitted the investigation of dopamine-associated cached values in a context in which reward magnitude and subjective preference were dissociated. We observed greater cue-evoked mesolimbic dopamine release to options yielding the high-value reward even when rats preferred the option yielding the low-value reward. This result identifies a clear mismatch between the ordinal utility of the available options and the rank ordering of their cached values, thereby providing robust evidence that dopamine-associated cached values cannot be the sole determinant of choices in simple economic decision making.
Institutions: University of Washington, University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: Training in Addiction Neuroscience, Cortical and mesolimbic dopamine interactions during cost-benefit value calculation., Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), G2468180752, G259607607, G284250273, Contribution of dopamine to risk attitude across the lifespan, G312364427, Influence of orbitofrontal cortex on mesolimbic dopamine and value-based choice., G3526590103, G4644083510, Institutional Grant for Neurobiology, G4841805262, Subsecond modulation of cost/benefit decision making by dopamine, G6904586998, G7361143104, G8810701997, G9000133739
OpenAlex ID: W2050770543