Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, United States.
Elife. 2018 Sep 20;7:e37275. doi: 10.7554/eLife.37275.
The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is important for learning from feedback, and for biasing and invigorating behaviour in response to cues that predict motivationally relevant outcomes. NAc encodes outcome-related cue features such as the magnitude and identity of reward. However, little is known about how features of cues themselves are encoded. We designed a decision making task where rats learned multiple sets of outcome-predictive cues, and recorded single-unit activity in the NAc during performance. We found that coding of cue identity and location occurred alongside coding of expected outcome. Furthermore, this coding persisted both during a delay period, after the rat made a decision and was waiting for an outcome, and after the outcome was revealed. Encoding of cue features in the NAc may enable contextual modulation of on-going behaviour, and provide an eligibility trace of outcome-predictive stimuli for updating stimulus-outcome associations to inform future behaviour.
伏隔核（NAc）对于从反馈中学习以及对于根据预测动机相关结果的线索来引导和激发行为很重要。NAc 对与结果相关的线索特征进行编码，例如奖励的大小和身份。然而，关于线索本身的特征是如何被编码的，我们知之甚少。我们设计了一个决策任务，让老鼠学习多组预测结果的线索，并在老鼠执行任务期间记录 NAc 中的单细胞活动。我们发现，线索身份和位置的编码与预期结果的编码同时发生。此外，这种编码在老鼠做出决定并等待结果以及结果揭示后，在延迟期间仍然存在。NAc 中的线索特征编码可能能够对正在进行的行为进行上下文调制，并为更新刺激-结果关联提供结果预测性刺激的资格迹，以指导未来的行为。
