Brief ReportPhasic Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine Release Encodes Effort- and Delay-Related Costs
Section snippets
Methods and Materials
The NAc dopamine concentration was monitored in rats (n = 10) trained in either effort-based or delay-based decision tasks (Figure S1 in Supplement 1 and Figure 1A;Supplementary Methods in Supplement 1). In these tasks, rewards of equal magnitude (45-mg sucrose pellets) were made available at either low or high value in pseudorandomly ordered trials, with 90 total trials/behavioral session. On forced-choice trials (60/session), distinct 5-sec cue lights signaled the available response option
Results
During behavioral sessions, animals readily overcame high-effort demands or long delays to obtain rewards (Figures 1B and 1E) and discriminated between reward-predictive cues to reduce errors on forced-choice trials (error rates significantly below chance levels; p < .0001 for all comparisons; Figures 1C and 1F). On free-choice trials, animals exhibited a marked preference for low-cost and immediate reward options over high-cost and delayed reward options (paired t test on choice allocation; p
Discussion
Dopamine neurons encode a reward prediction error signal in which cues that predict rewards evoke phasic increases in firing rate, whereas fully expected rewards do not alter dopamine activity (13). This signal is also sensitive to a number of features of the upcoming reward, because cues that predict larger, immediate, or more probable rewards evoke larger spikes in dopamine neuron activity than cues that predict smaller, delayed, or less probable rewards (9, 10, 11, 14). In this way, dopamine
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