Mesostriatal dopamine is sensitive to changes in specific cue-reward contingencies

Learning causal relationships relies on understanding how often one event precedes another. To gain an understanding of how dopamine neuron activity and neurotransmitter release change when a retrospective relationship is degraded for a specific pair of events, we used outcome-selective Pavlovian contingency degradation in rats. Two cues were paired with distinct food rewards, one of which was also delivered in the absence of either cue. Conditioned responding was attenuated for the cue-reward contingency that was degraded. Dopamine neuron activity in the midbrain and dopamine release in the ventral striatum in response to the cue and subsequent reward were attenuated during degraded versus non-degraded trials, and contingency degradation also abolished the trial-by-trial history dependence of dopamine responses at the time of trial outcome. This profile of changes in cue- and reward-evoked responding is not easily explained by a standard reinforcement learning model. An alternative mod..., , , # Mesostriatal dopamine is sensitive to changes in specific cue-reward contingencies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q573n5tr1](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q573n5tr1)

This dataset includes two types of behavioral data. First, there are conditioned port entry rates from five separate cohorts of rats: those that underwent fiber photometry recordings using GCaMP6f in ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons, those that underwent fiber photometry recordings using dLight1.2 in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core, those that underwent a context manipulation, those that underwent optogenetic inhibition of VTA dopamine neurons, and those that underwent optogenetic inhibition of dopamine release. Second, there are behavioral measures derived from videos: conditioned head velocities and distances between head and mid-tail derived from DeepLabCut, and conditioned rates of rearing and rotating derived from video hand-scoring.

This dataset also includes fiber photometry data taken from rats th...