Citation

Park J, Moghaddam B. Elife 2017; 6: e30056.

Affiliation

Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, dLife Sciences Plublications, Ltd)

DOI

10.7554/eLife.30056

PMID

29058673

PMCID

PMC5697935

Abstract

Actions motivated by rewards are often associated with risk of punishment. Little is known about the neural representation of punishment risk during reward-seeking behavior. We modeled this circumstance in rats by designing a task where actions were consistently rewarded but probabilistically punished. Spike activity and local field potentials were recorded during task performance simultaneously from VTA and mPFC, two reciprocally connected regions implicated in reward-seeking and aversive behaviors. At the single unit level, we found that ensembles of putative dopamine and non-dopamine VTA neurons and mPFC neurons encode the relationship between action and punishment. At the network level, we found that coherent theta oscillations synchronize VTA and mPFC in a bottom-up direction, effectively phase-modulating the neuronal spike activity in the two regions during punishment-free actions. This synchrony declined as a function of punishment probability, suggesting that during reward-seeking actions, risk of punishment diminishes VTA-driven neural synchrony between the two regions.

Language: en

Keywords

anxiety; dopamine; instrumental action; neural synchrony; neuroscience; punishment; rat; reward