Dissociable Roles of Ventral and Dorsal Striatum in Instrumental Conditioning

• Published in: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 304; no. 5669; pp. 452 - 454
• Main Authors: O'Doherty, John, Dayan, Peter, Schultz, Johannes, Deichmann, Ralf, Friston, Karl, Dolan, Raymond J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Association for the Advancement of Science 16.04.2004; The American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Subjects: Adult; Animals; Basal ganglia; Basal Ganglia - physiology; Behavioral neuroscience; Biological and medical sciences; Brain; Brain chemistry; Caudate Nucleus - physiology; Classical Conditioning; Computers; Conditioning, Classical; Conditioning, Operant; Coordinate systems; Environment; Error signals; Experimentation; Feedback (Response); Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Hemispheres; Human subjects; Humans; Learning; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Neurons; Nucleus accumbens; Nucleus Accumbens - physiology; Observations; Operant Conditioning; Physiological aspects; Probability; Putamen; Putamen - physiology; Reinforcement (Psychology); Reward; Stimuli; Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs; United Kingdom; Learning; Human; Acquisition process; Central nervous system; Reinforcement; Instrumental conditioning; Basal ganglion; Corpus striatum; Models; Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; Encephalon
• ISSN: 0036-8075; 1095-9203; 1095-9203
• DOI: 10.1126/science.1094285

Instrumental conditioning studies how animals and humans choose actions appropriate to the affective structure of an environment. According to recent reinforcement learning models, two distinct components are involved: a "critic," which learns to predict future reward, and an "actor," which maintains information about the rewarding outcomes of actions to enable better ones to be chosen more frequently. We scanned human participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they engaged in instrumental conditioning. Our results suggest partly dissociable contributions of the ventral and dorsal striatum, with the former corresponding to the critic and the latter corresponding to the actor.