Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States.
The Neurosciences Graduate Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States.
Elife. 2018 Jun 13;7:e35988. doi: 10.7554/eLife.35988.
Recent hypotheses have posited that orbital frontal cortex (OFC) is important for using inferred consequences to guide behavior. Less clear is OFC's contribution to goal-directed or model-based behavior, where the decision to act is controlled by previous experience with the consequence or outcome. Investigating OFC's role in learning about changed outcomes separate from decision-making is not trivial and often the two are confounded. Here we adapted an incentive learning task to mice, where we investigated processes controlling experience-based outcome updating independent from inferred action control. We found chemogenetic OFC attenuation did not alter the ability to perceive motivational state-induced changes in outcome value but did prevent the experience-based updating of this change. Optogenetic inhibition of OFC excitatory neuron activity selectively when experiencing an outcome change disrupted the ability to update, leaving mice unable to infer the appropriate behavior. Our findings support a role for OFC in learning that controls decision-making.
最近的假说假设眶额皮层（OFC）对于利用推断的后果来指导行为很重要。不太清楚的是 OFC 对目标导向或基于模型的行为的贡献，在这种行为中，行动的决定是由先前对后果或结果的经验控制的。研究 OFC 在学习改变的结果方面的作用，而不考虑决策，这并不简单，而且这两者通常是混淆的。在这里，我们改编了一个激励学习任务到老鼠身上，在那里我们研究了控制基于经验的结果更新的过程，而不依赖于推断的行动控制。我们发现化学遗传抑制 OFC 不会改变感知动机状态诱导的结果价值变化的能力，但确实阻止了这种变化的基于经验的更新。当经历结果变化时，选择性地抑制 OFC 兴奋性神经元活动会破坏更新的能力，使老鼠无法推断出适当的行为。我们的发现支持 OFC 在控制决策的学习中的作用。
