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What role does phasic mesolimbic dopamine transmission play in guiding cost-benefit decisions ?

Ventral striatal dopamine has long been connected both with motivating behaviors aimed at acquiring rewards and with signaling when those rewards are different than expected [1]. Such signals might then be used to bias animals' choices towards options associated with greater benefits. However, the exact role that phasic dopamine transmission plays in decision making remains unclear [2, 3]. One reason is that, while most studies have investigated the role of dopamine in situations where decisions are guided by reward magnitude or the likelihood of receiving reward, less attention has been paid to other factors that are critical to a foraging animal, such as the cost of a course of action or an animal’s motivational state. To address this, we have used fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to monitor dopamine transmission while rats learned and performed a series of changing cost-benefit decision making tasks.