RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Dopamine firing plays a double role in coding reward prediction errors and signaling motivation in a working memory task
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.05.01.071977
DO 10.1101/2020.05.01.071977
A1 Stefania Sarno
A1 Manuel Beirán
A1 Joan Falcó-Roget
A1 Gabriel Diaz-deLeon
A1 Román Rossi-Pool
A1 Ranulfo Romo
A1 Néstor Parga
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/21/2020.05.01.071977.abstract
AB Little is known about how dopamine (DA) neuron firing rates behave in cognitively demanding decision-making tasks. Here we investigated midbrain DA activity in monkeys performing a discrimination task in which the animal had to use working memory (WM) to report which of two sequentially applied vibrotactile stimuli had the higher frequency. We found that perception was altered by an internal bias, likely generated by deterioration of the representation of the first frequency during the WM period. This bias greatly controlled the DA phasic response during the two stimulation periods, confirming that DA reward prediction errors reflected subjective stimulus perception. Contrastingly, tonic dopamine activity during WM was not affected by the bias and did not encode the stored frequency. More interestingly, both WM activity and phasic responses before the second stimulus negatively correlated with reaction times of the animal after the trial start cue and thus represented motivated behavior on a trial-by-trial basis. During WM, this motivation signal underwent a ramp-like increase. At the same time, motivation reduced noise in perception and, by decreasing the effect of the bias, improved performance, especially in difficult trials. Overall, our results show that DA activity was simultaneously involved in reward prediction, motivation and WM. Also, the ramping activity during the WM period suggests a possible DA role in stabilizing sustained cortical activity, hypothetically by increasing the gain communicated to prefrontal neurons in a motivation-dependent way.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.