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The uncertain nature of dopamine

Molecular Psychiatry volume 9, pages 122–123 (2004)Cite this article

The finding that dopamine neurons of the ventral midbrain are activated by reward uncertainty challenges past models of dopamine's role in reinforcement, while at the same time suggesting that dopamine may act to reinforce gambling and risk-taking behavior.

To understand the function of dopamine in the brain, it is of obvious importance to know the natural conditions in which the activity of dopamine-containing neurons is modulated. To this end, Wolfram Schultz et al have made single-unit electrophysiological recordings from dopamine neurons of the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area of behaving primates. As virtually no qualitative electrophysiological differences between dopamine neurons of these two regions of the ventral midbrain have been reported, at any level of investigation, I will refer to them collectively as dopamine neurons. Dopamine neurons respond with a phasic burst of activity (∼100 ms in duration, with an onset latency of ∼80 ms) following the onset of any arbitrary stimulus that predicts reward (food or liquid), provided that the stimulus itself was unpredicted (reviewed by Schultz).1 The basic observation, confirmed and extended by recent work,2,3, is that the phasic response of dopamine neurons appears to signal a reward prediction error. Thus, at each moment in time, the activity of dopamine neurons increases if reward prediction is better than expected, decreases if reward prediction is worser than expected, and is unchanged if reward prediction occurs as expected.

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  1. Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DY, UK

    C D Fiorillo

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Fiorillo, C. The uncertain nature of dopamine. Mol Psychiatry 9, 122–123 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.mp.4001445

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