Orbital frontal cortex updates state-induced value change for decision-making

Abstract
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Abstract

Recent hypotheses have posited that orbital frontal cortex (OFC) is important for using inferred consequences to guide behavior. Less clear is OFC's contribution to goal-directed or model-based behavior, where the decision to act is controlled by previous experience with the consequence or outcome. Investigating OFC's role in learning about changed outcomes separate from decision-making is not trivial and often the two are confounded. Here we adapted an incentive learning task to mice, where we investigated processes controlling experience-based outcome updating independent from inferred action control. We found chemogenetic OFC attenuation did not alter the ability to perceive motivational state-induced changes in outcome value but did prevent the experience-based updating of this change. Optogenetic inhibition of OFC excitatory neuron activity selectively when experiencing an outcome change disrupted the ability to update, leaving mice unable to infer the appropriate behavior. Our findings support a role for OFC in learning that controls decision-making.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Code used in these studies has been deposited in Github.

Article and author information

Author details

Emily T Baltz

Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9770-3666
Ege A Yalcinbas

Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Rafael Renteria

Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Christina M Gremel

Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States

For correspondence
cgremel@ucsd.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8710-0543

Funding

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R00AA021780)

Christina M Gremel

Whitehall Foundation

Christina M Gremel

Brain and Behavior Research Foundation

Christina M Gremel

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R01AA026077)

Christina M Gremel

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. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#S105060) of the University of California, San Diego.

Copyright

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.