Distinct roles of striatal direct and indirect pathways in value-based decision making
- Institute for Basic Science, Republic of Korea
Abstract
The striatum is critically involved in value-based decision making. However, it is unclear how striatal direct and indirect pathways work together to make optimal choices in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Here, we examined the effects of selectively inactivating D1 receptor (D1R)- or D2 receptor (D2R)-expressing dorsal striatal neurons (corresponding to direct- and indirect-pathway neurons, respectively) on mouse choice behavior in a reversal task with progressively increasing reversal frequency and a dynamic two-armed bandit task. Inactivation of either D1R- or D2R-expressing striatal neurons impaired performance in both tasks, but the pattern of altered choice behavior differed between the two animal groups. A reinforcement learning model-based analysis indicated that inactivation of D1R- and D2R-expressing striatal neurons selectively impairs value-dependent action selection and value learning, respectively. Our results suggest differential contributions of striatal direct and indirect pathways to two distinct steps in value-based decision making.
Data availability
Data is available via Dryad under doi:10.5061/dryad.4c80mn5.
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Data from: Distinct roles of striatal direct and indirect pathways in value-based decision makingDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.4c80mn5.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Research Center Program of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS-R002-G1)
- Min Whan Jung
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The experimental protocol was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon, Korea; approval number approval number KA2018-08).
Copyright
© 2019, Kwak & Jung
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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Distinct roles of striatal direct and indirect pathways in value-based decision making
eLife 8:e46050.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46050
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