Journal article
Dopamine modulates dynamic decision-making during foraging
- Abstract:
- The mesolimbic dopaminergic system exerts a crucial influence on incentive processing. However, the contribution of dopamine in dynamic, ecological situations where reward rates vary, and decisions evolve over time, remains unclear. In such circumstances, current (foreground) reward accrual needs to be compared continuously with potential rewards that could be obtained by travelling elsewhere (background reward rate), in order to determine the opportunity cost of staying versus leaving. We hypothesised that dopamine specifically modulates the influence of background – but not foreground – reward information when making a dynamic comparison of these variables for optimal behaviour. On a novel foraging task based on an ecological account of animal behaviour (marginal value theorem), human participants of either sex decided when to leave locations in situations where foreground rewards depleted at different rates, either in rich or poor environments with high or low background rates. In line with theoretical accounts, people’s decisions to move from current locations were independently modulated by changes in both foreground and background reward rates. Pharmacological manipulation of dopamine D2 receptor activity using the agonist cabergoline significantly affected decisions to move on, specifically modulating the effect of background reward rates. In particular, when on cabergoline, people left patches in poor environments much earlier. These results demonstrate a role of dopamine in signalling the opportunity cost of rewards, not value per se. Using this ecologically derived framework we uncover a specific mechanism by which D2 dopamine receptor activity modulates decision-making when foreground and background reward rates are dynamically compared.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, 1.6MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2586-19.2020
Authors
- Publisher:
- Society for Neuroscience
- Journal:
- Journal of Neuroscience More from this journal
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 27
- Pages:
- 5273-5282
- Publication date:
- 2020-05-26
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-04-28
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1529-2401
- ISSN:
-
0270-6474
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1102349
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1102349
- Deposit date:
-
2020-04-29
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Le Heron et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record