Mesolimbic Dopamine Signals the Value of Work

By Arif A. Hamid, Jeffrey R. Pettibone, O. Mabrouk, Vaughn L. Hetrick, Robert Schmidt, Caitlin M. Vander Weele, Robert T. Kennedy, Brandon J. Aragona, Joshua D. Berke. Nature Neuroscience, 2015

709 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dopamine cell firing can encode errors in reward prediction, providing a learning signal to guide future behavior. Yet dopamine is also a key modulator of motivation, invigorating current behavior. Existing theories propose that fast (phasic) dopamine fluctuations support learning, whereas much slower (tonic) dopamine changes are involved in motivation. We examined dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens across multiple time scales, using complementary microdialysis and voltammetric methods during adaptive decision-making. We found that minute-by-minute dopamine levels covaried with reward rate and motivational vigor. Second-by-second dopamine release encoded an estimate of temporally discounted future reward (a value function). Changing dopamine immediately altered willingness to work and reinforced preceding action choices by encoding temporal-difference reward prediction errors. Our results indicate that dopamine conveys a single, rapidly evolving decision variable, the available reward for investment of effort, which is employed for both learning and motivational functions.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f60ec60ab3341146e92c0681ee57eded308c378

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction. (2019, positive): “The stimulation of D2R, through tonic DA ﬁring (implicated in motivation), without concomitant phasic ﬁring (implicated in associative learning) (142), can oppose drug consumption through its modulation of PFC regions involved with self-regulation (149).”
Dopamine reward prediction errors reflect hidden state inference across time (2017, neutral): “Furthermore, a recent study showed that intra-trial changes in dopamine firing may signal information distinct from pure RPEs, prompting us to choose a single pre-cue baseline rather than an intra-trial baseline 14 .”