Complementary contributions of basolateral amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex to value learning under uncertainty
- University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Abstract
We make choices based on the values of expected outcomes, informed by previous experience in similar settings. When the outcomes of our decisions consistently violate expectations, new learning is needed to maximize rewards. Yet not every surprising event indicates a meaningful change in the environment. Even when conditions are stable overall, outcomes of a single experience can still be unpredictable due to small fluctuations (i.e., expected uncertainty) in reward or costs. In the present work, we investigate causal contributions of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in rats to learning under expected outcome uncertainty in a novel delay-based task that incorporates both predictable fluctuations and directional shifts in outcome values. We demonstrate that OFC is required to accurately represent the distribution of wait times to stabilize choice preferences despite trial-by-trial fluctuations in outcomes, whereas BLA is necessary for the facilitation of learning in response to surprising events.
Article and author information
Author details
Alexandra Stolyarova
Funding
UCLA's Division of Life Sciences Recruitment and Retention fund
- Alicia Izquierdo
Opportunity Fund
- Alicia Izquierdo
Academic Senate Grant
- Alicia Izquierdo
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
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. Research protocols (#2013-094-13A) were approved by the Chancellor's Animal Research Committee at the University of California, Los Angeles. All surgeries were performed under isoflurane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2017, Stolyarova & Izquierdo
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Complementary contributions of basolateral amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex to value learning under uncertainty
eLife 6:e27483.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27483
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
