A unidirectional but not uniform striatal landscape of dopamine signaling for motivational stimuli

Dopamine signals in the striatum are critical for motivated behavior. However, their regional specificity and precise information content are actively debated. Dopaminergic projections to the striatum are topographically organized. Thus, we quantified dopamine release in response to motivational sti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2022-05, Vol.119 (21), p.1-12
Main Authors: van Elzelingen, Wouter, Goedhoop, Jessica, Warnaar, Pascal, Denys, Damiaan, Arbab, Tara, Willuhn, Ingo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological Sciences
Concentration gradient
Corpus Striatum
Dopamine
Dopamine receptors
Error signals
Learning
Motivation
Neostriatum
Reward
Stimuli
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Summary:Dopamine signals in the striatum are critical for motivated behavior. However, their regional specificity and precise information content are actively debated. Dopaminergic projections to the striatum are topographically organized. Thus, we quantified dopamine release in response to motivational stimuli and associated predictive cues in six principal striatal regions of unrestrained, behaving rats. Absolute signal size and its modulation by stimulus value and by subjective state of the animal were interregionally heterogeneous on a medial to lateral gradient. In contrast, dopamine-concentration direction of change was homogeneous across all regions: appetitive stimuli increased and aversive stimuli decreased dopamine concentration. Although cues predictive of such motivational stimuli acquired the same influence over dopamine homogeneously across all regions, dopamine-mediated prediction-error signals were restricted to the ventromedial, limbic striatum. Together, our findings demonstrate a nuanced striatal landscape of unidirectional but not uniform dopamine signals, topographically encoding distinct aspects of motivational stimuli and their prediction.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2117270119