Dopamine type 2 receptor in dorsal striatum as a regulator of perceptually guided versus memory guided decision making

Monday, September 22, 2014 — Poster Session I
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.	FAES Academic Center	NIMH	NEURO-14

* FARE Award Winner

Authors

• E. Lee
• O. Dal Monte
• B.B. Averbeck

Abstract

In everyday life, in order to select an action to achieve an outcome which is best suited to a current goal, integration of previously acquired knowledge of the environment and immediately available information is required. If the mapping between actions and outcomes in a context is unpredictable over time, learning does not occur, and decisions must be made on the basis of immediately available information. Alternatively, if action-outcome mappings can be learned by reinforcement, they are more informative than immediately available information. There is ample evidence that dopamine (DA) is likely involved in the dynamic interaction of the perceptually guided and memory guided decision making. In order to investigate the role of DA in the trade-off between the two processes, monkeys were trained on an oculomotor sequential decision making task. While the animals performed the task we injected locally a DA type 1 or type 2 receptor antagonist or saline into the dorsal striatum (dStr), and recorded related neural activity simultaneously in both the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and the dStr. The behavioral results showed that injection of a D2R antagonist into the dStr increased noises not in the perceptually guided decision making but only in the memory guided one.

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