RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Discrete and coordinated encoding of punishment contingent on rewarded actions by prefrontal cortex and VTA
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 157032
DO 10.1101/157032
A1 Junchol Park
A1 Bita Moghaddam
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/28/157032.abstract
AB Actions motivated by a rewarding outcome are often associated with a risk of punishment. Little is known about the neural representation of punishment that is contingent on reward-guided behavior. We modeled this circumstance by using a task where actions were consistently rewarded but probabilistically punished. Spike activity and local field potentials were recorded during this task simultaneously from VTA and mPFC, two reciprocally connected regions implicated in both reward-seeking and aversive behavioral states. At the single unit level, we found that ensembles of VTA and mPFC neurons encode the contingency between action and punishment. At the network level, we found that coherent theta oscillations synchronize the VTA and mPFC in a bottom-up direction, effectively phase-modulating the neuronal spike activity in the two regions during punishment-free actions. This synchrony declined as a function of punishment contingency, suggesting that during reward-seeking actions, risk of punishment diminishes VTA-driven neural synchrony between the two regions.