TY - JOUR T1 - Firing of Putative Dopamine Neurons in Ventral Tegmental Area Is Modulated by Probability of Success during Performance of a Stop-Change Task JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0007-18.2018 SP - ENEURO.0007-18.2018 AU - Stephen S. Tennyson AU - Adam T. Brockett AU - Nicholas W. Hricz AU - Daniel W. Bryden AU - Matthew R. Roesch Y1 - 2018/04/09 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2018/04/09/ENEURO.0007-18.2018.abstract N2 - Response inhibition, the ability to refrain from unwanted actions, is an essential component of complex behavior and is often impaired across numerous neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Accordingly, much research has been devoted to characterizing brain regions responsible for the regulation of response inhibition. The stop-signal task, a task in which animals are required to inhibit a prepotent response in the presence of a STOP cue, is one of the most well-studied tasks of response inhibition. While pharmacological evidence suggests that dopamine (DA) contributes to the regulation of response inhibition, what is exactly encoded by DA neurons during performance of response inhibition tasks is unknown. To address this issue, we recorded from single units in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) while rats performed a stop-change task. We found that putative DA neurons fired less and higher to cues and reward on STOP trials relative to GO trials, respectively, and that firing was reduced during errors. These results suggest that DA neurons in VTA encode the uncertainty associated with the probability of obtaining reward on difficult trials instead of the saliency associated with STOP cues or the need to resolve conflict between competing responses during response inhibition.Significance Statement The ability to refrain from unwanted actions, also known as response inhibition, is an essential component of complex behavior, and is impaired across numerous neuropsychiatric disorders including addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and schizophrenia. Dopamine (DA) is important for reward learning but its role in response inhibition is less clear. For the first time, we characterized the activity of DA neurons in rats performing a response inhibition task, and found that DA neurons primarily signaled information regarding the uncertainty of obtaining reward during cues and reward delivery when behavioral trials were difficult and there was a low probability of success. ER -