title: Discrete coding of stimulus value, reward expectation, and reward prediction error in the dorsal striatum.
abstract: To investigate how the striatum integrates sensory information with reward information for behavioral guidance, we recorded single-unit activity in the dorsal striatum of head-fixed rats participating in a probabilistic Pavlovian conditioning task with auditory conditioned stimuli (CSs) in which reward probability was fixed for each CS but parametrically varied across CSs. We found that the activity of many neurons was linearly correlated with the reward probability indicated by the CSs. The recorded neurons could be classified according to their firing patterns into functional subtypes coding reward probability in different forms such as stimulus value, reward expectation, and reward prediction error. These results suggest that several functional subgroups of dorsal striatal neurons represent different kinds of information formed through extensive prior exposure to CS-reward contingencies.
authors.affiliation: Division of Systems Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, Sendai, Japan; Department of Physiology, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan;
authors.forename: Kei
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Oyama
authors.affiliation: Division of Systems Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, Sendai, Japan;
authors.forename: Yukina
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tateyama
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Zoology and Neurobiology and Szentagothai Research Center, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary; and.
authors.forename: István
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Hernádi
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Philippe N
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Tobler
authors.affiliation: Division of Systems Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, Sendai, Japan;
authors.forename: Toshio
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Iijima
authors.affiliation: Division of Systems Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, Sendai, Japan; tsutsui@m.tohoku.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Ken-Ichiro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tsutsui
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D017072:Neostriatum / Q000502:physiology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D011336:Probability; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D012201:Reward
keywords: Pavlovian conditioning; head-fixed rats; single-unit recording