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Dissociable cost and benefit encoding of future rewards by mesolimbic dopamine

Abstract

Reward-predicting cues evoke activity in midbrain dopamine neurons that encodes fundamental attributes of economic value, including reward magnitude, delay and uncertainty. We found that dopamine release in rat nucleus accumbens encodes anticipated benefits, but not effort-based response costs unless they are atypically low. This neural separation of costs and benefits indicates that mesolimbic dopamine scales with the value of pending rewards, but does not encode the net utility of the action to obtain them.

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Figure 1: Decision making following manipulation of benefits or costs.
Figure 2: Effect of behavioral history on dopamine release.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank S. Ng-Evans for invaluable technical support, C. Akers and S. Barnes for assistance, and J. Clark, S. Sandberg and M. Wanat for helpful comments. This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R01-MH079292 and R21-AG030775 to P.E.M.P.) and a Wellcome Trust Advanced Training Fellowship (M.E.W.). J.O.G. was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32-GM007270, Kimelman).

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M.E.W. and P.E.M.P. conceived the study. J.O.G. and M.E.W. collected and analyzed the data. All authors contributed to experimental design and preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Paul E M Phillips.

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Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Results (PDF 880 kb)

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Gan, J., Walton, M. & Phillips, P. Dissociable cost and benefit encoding of future rewards by mesolimbic dopamine. Nat Neurosci 13, 25–27 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2460

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