1 Department of Psychology/Centre for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
2 Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
3 Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, MD, USA.
4 Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, MD, USA. geoffrey.schoenbaum@nih.gov.
5 Departments of Anatomy & Neurobiology and Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA. geoffrey.schoenbaum@nih.gov.
6 Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. geoffrey.schoenbaum@nih.gov.
7 Department of Psychology/Centre for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. mihaela.iordanova@concordia.ca.

Causal evidence supporting the proposal that dopamine transients function as temporal difference prediction errors.

Nat Neurosci. 2020 Jan 20;:

Authors: Maes EJP, Sharpe MJ, Usypchuk AA, Lozzi M, Chang CY, Gardner MPH, Schoenbaum G, Iordanova MD

Abstract

Reward-evoked dopamine transients are well established as prediction errors. However, the central tenet of temporal difference accounts-that similar transients evoked by reward-predictive cues also function as errors-remains untested. In the present communication we addressed this by showing that optogenetically shunting dopamine activity at the start of a reward-predicting cue prevents second-order conditioning without affecting blocking. These results indicate that cue-evoked transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions.

PMID: 31959935 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]