Causal evidence supporting the proposal that dopamine transients function as temporal difference prediction errors

• Published in: Nature neuroscience Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 176 - 178
• Main Authors: Maes, Etienne J. P, Sharpe, Melissa J., Usypchuk, Alexandra A., Lozzi, Megan, Chang, Chun Yun, Gardner, Matthew P. H., Schoenbaum, Geoffrey, Iordanova, Mihaela D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Nature Publishing Group US 01-02-2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 13/109; 14/35; 42/44; 631/378/1595; 631/378/1788; Animal Genetics and Genomics; Animals; Association Learning - physiology; Associative learning; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Brain - physiology; Brain research; Brief Communication; Conditioning; Conditioning, Operant - physiology; Cues; Dopamine; Dopamine - metabolism; Dopaminergic Neurons - physiology; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Physiological aspects; Predictions; Rats; Rats, Long-Evans; Rats, Transgenic; Reinforcement; Reinforcement (Psychology); Reward; United States
• ISSN: 1097-6256; 1546-1726
• DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0574-1

Reward-evoked dopamine transients are well established as prediction errors. However, the central tenet of temporal difference accounts—that similar transients evoked by reward-predictive cues also function as errors—remains untested. In the present communication we addressed this by showing that optogenetically shunting dopamine activity at the start of a reward-predicting cue prevents second-order conditioning without affecting blocking. These results indicate that cue-evoked transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions.
Maes et al. use second-order conditioning, blocking and optogenetic inhibition to show that cue-evoked dopamine transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions.