Critical periods when dopamine controls behavioral responding during Pavlovian learning

Abstract

Rationale

Learning the association between rewards and predictive cues is critical for appetitive behavioral responding. The mesolimbic dopamine system is thought to play an integral role in establishing these cue–reward associations. The dopamine response to cues can signal differences in reward value, though this emerges only after significant training. This suggests that the dopamine system may differentially regulate behavioral responding depending on the phase of training.

Objectives

The purpose of this study was to determine whether antagonizing dopamine receptors elicited different effects on behavior depending on the phase of training or the type of Pavlovian task.

Methods

Separate groups of male rats were trained on Pavlovian tasks in which distinct audio cues signaled either differences in reward size or differences in reward rate. The dopamine receptor antagonist flupenthixol was systemically administered prior to either the first ten sessions of training (acquisition phase) or the second ten sessions of training (expression phase), and we monitored the effect of these manipulations for an additional ten training sessions.

Results

We identified acute effects of dopamine receptor antagonism on conditioned responding, the latency to respond, and post-reward head entries in both Pavlovian tasks. Interestingly, dopamine receptor antagonism during the expression phase produced persistent deficits in behavioral responding only in rats trained on the reward size Pavlovian task.

Conclusions

Together, our results illustrate that dopamine’s control over behavior in Pavlovian tasks depends upon one’s prior training experience and the information signaled by the cues.