Nigrostriatal dopamine signals sequence-specific action-outcome prediction errors.

ABSTRACT: Dopamine has been suggested to encode cue-reward prediction errors during Pavlovian conditioning, signaling discrepancies between actual versus expected reward predicted by the cues.^1-5 While this theory has been widely applied to reinforcement learning concerning instrumental actions, whether dopamine represents action-outcome prediction errors and how it controls sequential behavior remain largely unknown. The vast majority of previous studies examining dopamine responses primarily have used discrete reward-predictive stimuli,^1-15 whether Pavlovian conditioned stimuli for which no action is required to earn reward or explicit discriminative stimuli that essentially instruct an animal how and when to respond for reward. Here, by training mice to perform optogenetic i

SUBMITTER: Hollon NG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8665080 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature