Lateral orbitofrontal neurons acquire responses to upshifted, downshifted, or blocked cues during unblocking
- National Institute on Drug Abuse, United States
- Boston College, United States
- University of Maryland School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
The lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) has been described as signaling either outcome expectancies or value. Previously, we used unblocking to show that lOFC neurons respond to a predictive cue signaling a 'valueless' change in outcome features (McDannald, 2014). However, many of lOFC neurons also fired to a cue that simply signaled more reward. Here, we recorded lOFC neurons in a variant of this task in which rats learned about cues that signaled either more (upshift), less (downshift) or the same (blocked) amount of reward. We found that neurons acquired responses specifically to one of the three cues and did not fire to the other two. These results show that, at least early in learning, lOFC neurons fire to valued cues in a way that is more consistent with signaling of the predicted outcome's features than with signaling of a general, abstract or cached value that is independent of the outcome.
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Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#15-CNRB-108 and 12-CNRB-108) of the IRP.
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This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Lateral orbitofrontal neurons acquire responses to upshifted, downshifted, or blocked cues during unblocking
eLife 4:e11299.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11299
