Kocharian Adrina, Redish A David, Rothwell Patrick E
Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, MN.
Medical Scientist Training Program, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, MN.
bioRxiv. 2024 Sep 16:2024.09.16.613237. doi: 10.1101/2024.09.16.613237.
Nucleus accumbens dopamine signaling is an important neural substrate for decision-making. Dominant theories generally discretize and homogenize decision-making, when it is in fact a continuous process, with evaluation and re-evaluation components that extend beyond simple outcome prediction into consideration of past and future value. Extensive work has examined mesolimbic dopamine in the context of reward prediction error, but major gaps persist in our understanding of how dopamine regulates volitional and self-guided decision-making. Moreover, there is little consideration of individual differences in value processing that may shape how dopamine regulates decision-making. Here, using an economic foraging task in mice, we found that dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind. Optogenetic manipulations of mesolimbic dopamine release selectively altered evaluation and re-evaluation of decisions in mice whose dopamine dynamics and behavior reflected future value.
伏隔核多巴胺信号是决策的重要神经基础。主流理论通常将决策离散化和同质化，而实际上决策是一个连续的过程，其评估和重新评估成分不仅包括简单的结果预测，还涉及对过去和未来价值的考量。大量研究在奖励预测误差的背景下考察了中脑边缘多巴胺，但在我们对多巴胺如何调节意志性和自我引导决策的理解上仍存在重大差距。此外，对于可能影响多巴胺调节决策方式的价值加工中的个体差异，人们考虑甚少。在此，我们利用小鼠的一项经济觅食任务发现，伏隔核核心的多巴胺动态反映了决策评估过程中的决策信心，以及重新评估和改变主意过程中的过去和未来价值。对中脑边缘多巴胺释放的光遗传学操纵选择性地改变了多巴胺动态和行为反映未来价值的小鼠的决策评估和重新评估。
