title: Aberrant Salience Is Related to Reduced Reinforcement Learning Signals and Elevated Dopamine Synthesis Capacity in Healthy Adults.
abstract: The striatum is known to play a key role in reinforcement learning, specifically in the encoding of teaching signals such as reward prediction errors (RPEs). It has been proposed that aberrant salience attribution is associated with impaired coding of RPE and heightened dopamine turnover in the striatum, and might be linked to the development of psychotic symptoms. However, the relationship of aberrant salience attribution, RPE coding, and dopamine synthesis capacity has not been directly investigated. Here we assessed the association between a behavioral measure of aberrant salience attribution, the salience attribution test, to neural correlates of RPEs measured via functional magnetic resonance imaging while healthy participants (n = 58) performed an instrumental learning task. A subset of participants (n = 27) also underwent positron emission tomography with the radiotracer [(18)F]fluoro-l-DOPA to quantify striatal presynaptic dopamine synthesis capacity. Individual variability in aberrant salience measures related negatively to ventral striatal and prefrontal RPE signals and in an exploratory analysis was found to be positively associated with ventral striatal presynaptic dopamine levels. These data provide the first evidence for a specific link between the constructs of aberrant salience attribution, reduced RPE processing, and potentially increased presynaptic dopamine function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany, rebecca.boehme@charite.de.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Boehme
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany, Department of Neurology, Otto-von-Guericke University, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Lorenz
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7392-5280
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Deserno
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1106-0319
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gleich
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Teresa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Katthagen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pankow
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Institute of Neurophysiology, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, Medical School Brandenburg, 16816 Neuruppin, Germany, and.
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Behr
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Ralph
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Buchert
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, WC1N 3AR London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Jonathan P
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8269-1228
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Roiser
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Heinz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité Universitätsmedizin, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schlagenhauf
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000098:blood supply / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000378:metabolism*; D004298:Dopamine / Q000378:metabolism*; D015259:Dopamine Agents; D005260:Female; D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007980:Levodopa; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography; D062706:Prodromal Symptoms; D011618:Psychotic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000503:physiopathology; D011930:Reaction Time; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D015259:Dopamine Agents; D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18; D007980:Levodopa; D010100:Oxygen; D004298:Dopamine
keywords: aberrant salience; dopamine; orbitofrontal cortex; prediction error; reinforcement learning; ventral striatum