ArticleScientific reports2019
Dopamine blockade impairs the exploration-exploitation trade-off in rats.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reward and avoidance learning in the context of aversive environments and possible implications for depressive symptoms.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Neurobehavioral differences in value-based decision making between people with cocaine use disorder and controls.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Prediction error correlates in the striosome-dopamine circuit emerge from information gain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Separating random and deterministic sources of computational noise in explore-exploit decisions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- TMS-EEG evidence links random exploration to inhibitory mechanisms in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- The Effect of Reward Magnitude on Different Types of Exploration in Human Reinforcement Learning.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Altered trial-to-trial responses to reward outcomes in KCNMA1 knockout mice during probabilistic learning tasks.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2024Article
- Dopamine and Norepinephrine Differentially Mediate the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State.Affective science · 2024Article
- Exploration-exploitation model of moth-inspired olfactory navigation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Dopamine encoding of novelty facilitates efficient uncertainty-driven exploration.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Reward-based option competition in human dorsal stream and transition from stochastic exploration to exploitation in continuous space.Science advances · 2024Article
- Simulated synapse loss induces depression-like behaviors in deep reinforcement learning.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- Enhancing reinforcement learning models by including direct and indirect pathways improves performance on striatal dependent tasks.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Reinforcement learning deficits exhibited by postnatal PCP-treated rats enable deep neural network classification.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Article
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7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In a volatile environment where rewards are uncertain, successful performance requires a delicate balance between exploitation of the best option and exploration of alternative choices. It has theoretically been proposed that dopamine contributes to the control of this exploration-exploitation trade-off, specifically that the higher the level of tonic dopamine, the more exploitation is favored. We demonstrate here that there is a formal relationship between the rescaling of dopamine positive reward prediction errors and the exploration-exploitation trade-off in simple non-stationary multi-armed bandit tasks. We further show in rats performing such a task that systemically antagonizing dopamine receptors greatly increases the number of random choices without affecting learning capacities. Simulations and comparison of a set of different computational models (an extended Q-learning model, a directed exploration model, and a meta-learning model) fitted on each individual confirm that, independently of the model, decreasing dopaminergic activity does not affect learning rate but is equivalent to an increase in random exploration rate. This study shows that dopamine could adapt the exploration-exploitation trade-off in decision-making when facing changing environmental contingencies.
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