Action controls dopaminergic enhancement of reward representations

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2012-05, Vol.109 (19), p.7511-7516
• Main Authors: Guitart-Masip, Marc, Chowdhury, Rumana, Sharot, Tali, Dayan, Peter, Duzel, Emrah, Dolan, Raymond J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: administration & dosage; Adolescent; Adult; Analysis of Variance; Anticipation; Behavioral neuroscience; Biological Sciences; Brain; Citalopram; Citalopram - administration & dosage; Citalopram - pharmacology; Cognition & reasoning; Corpus Striatum; Corpus Striatum - drug effects; Corpus Striatum - metabolism; Corpus Striatum - physiology; Cues; decision making; Dopamine; Dopamine - metabolism; Dopamine Agents; Dopamine Agents - administration & dosage; Dopamine Agents - pharmacology; Double-Blind Method; drug effects; Drug interactions; Experimentation; Female; Fractals; human behavior; Humans; Levodopa; Levodopa - administration & dosage; Levodopa - pharmacology; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; metabolism; methods; Motivation; Neurons; pharmacology; physiology; Placebos; Post hoc; Proteins; Psychomotor Performance; Punishment; Putamen; Reward; Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors; Serotonin; Serotonin - metabolism; Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors - administration & dosage; Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors - pharmacology; Substantia Nigra; Substantia Nigra - drug effects; Substantia Nigra - metabolism; Substantia Nigra - physiology; Tegmentum Mesencephali; Tegmentum Mesencephali - drug effects; Tegmentum Mesencephali - metabolism; Tegmentum Mesencephali - physiology; Time Factors; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202229109

Dopamine is widely observed to signal anticipation of future rewards and thus thought to be a key contributor to affectively charged decision making. However, the experiments supporting this view have not dissociated rewards from the actions that lead to, or are occasioned by, them. Here, we manipulated dopamine pharmacologically and examined the effect on a task that explicitly dissociates action and reward value. We show that dopamine enhanced the neural representation of rewarding actions, without significantly affecting the representation of reward value as such. Thus, increasing dopamine levels with levodopa selectively boosted striatal and substantia nigra/ventral tegmental representations associated with actions leading to reward, but not with actions leading to the avoidance of punishment. These findings highlight a key role for dopamine in the generation of appetitively motivated actions.