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Nwakama CA, Durand-de Cuttoli R, Oketokoun ZM, Brown SO, Haller JE, Méndez A, Farshbaf MJ, Cho YZ, Ahmed S, Leng S, Ables JL, Sweis BM. Diabetes alters neuroeconomically dissociable forms of mental accounting. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.01.04.574210. [PMID: 38260368 PMCID: PMC10802482 DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.04.574210] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/24/2024]
Abstract
Those with diabetes mellitus are at high-risk of developing psychiatric disorders, yet the link between hyperglycemia and alterations in motivated behavior has not been explored in detail. We characterized value-based decision-making behavior of a streptozocin-induced diabetic mouse model on a naturalistic neuroeconomic foraging paradigm called Restaurant Row. Mice made self-paced choices while on a limited time-budget accepting or rejecting reward offers as a function of cost (delays cued by tone-pitch) and subjective value (flavors), tested daily in a closed-economy system across months. We found streptozocin-treated mice disproportionately undervalued less-preferred flavors and inverted their meal-consumption patterns shifted toward a more costly strategy that overprioritized high-value rewards. We discovered these foraging behaviors were driven by impairments in multiple decision-making systems, including the ability to deliberate when engaged in conflict and cache the value of the passage of time in the form of sunk costs. Surprisingly, diabetes-induced changes in behavior depended not only on the type of choice being made but also the salience of reward-scarcity in the environment. These findings suggest complex relationships between glycemic regulation and dissociable valuation algorithms underlying unique cognitive heuristics and sensitivity to opportunity costs can disrupt fundamentally distinct computational processes and could give rise to psychiatric vulnerabilities.
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Durand-de Cuttoli R, Martínez-Rivera FJ, Li L, Minier-Toribio A, Holt LM, Cathomas F, Yasmin F, Elhassa SO, Shaikh JF, Ahmed S, Russo SJ, Nestler EJ, Sweis BM. Distinct forms of regret linked to resilience versus susceptibility to stress are regulated by region-specific CREB function in mice. SCIENCE ADVANCES 2022; 8:eadd5579. [PMID: 36260683 PMCID: PMC9581472 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add5579] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/10/2022] [Revised: 06/23/2022] [Accepted: 08/30/2022] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
Regret describes recognizing alternative actions could have led to better outcomes. It remains unclear whether regret derives from generalized mistake appraisal or instead comprises dissociable, action-specific processes. Using a neuroeconomic task, we found that mice were sensitive to fundamentally distinct types of regret following exposure to chronic social defeat stress or manipulations of CREB, a transcription factor implicated in stress action. Bias to make compensatory decisions after rejecting high-value offers (regret type I) was unique to stress-susceptible mice. Bias following the converse operation, accepting low-value offers (regret type II), was enhanced in stress-resilient mice and absent in stress-susceptible mice. CREB function in either the prefrontal cortex or nucleus accumbens was required to suppress regret type I but bidirectionally regulated regret type II. We provide insight into how maladaptive stress response traits relate to distinct forms of counterfactual thinking, which could steer therapy for mood disorders, such as depression, toward circuit-specific computations through a careful description of decision narrative.
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Affiliation(s)
- Romain Durand-de Cuttoli
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Freddyson J. Martínez-Rivera
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Long Li
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Angélica Minier-Toribio
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Leanne M. Holt
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Flurin Cathomas
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Farzana Yasmin
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Salma O. Elhassa
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Jasmine F. Shaikh
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Sanjana Ahmed
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Scott J. Russo
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Eric J. Nestler
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
- Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Brian M. Sweis
- Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
- Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA
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Abstract
We confirm that rats can act as rational economic agents, making choices about how much work to do to obtain a reward in a way that optimally trades off the value of the reward against the cost of the effort. Contrary to the notion that bigger rewards are more motivating, rats worked harder in economies where rewards were small, ensuring a sufficient minimum income of water. But they chose to earn and consume more water per day when water was “cheap” (available for little work). We present a mathematical model explaining why rats work when they do (surprisingly, not just when they are thirsty) and suggesting where in the brain animals might compute the current value of working for water. In the laboratory, animals’ motivation to work tends to be positively correlated with reward magnitude. But in nature, rewards earned by work are essential to survival (e.g., working to find water), and the payoff of that work can vary on long timescales (e.g., seasonally). Under these constraints, the strategy of working less when rewards are small could be fatal. We found that instead, rats in a closed economy did more work for water rewards when the rewards were stably smaller, a phenomenon also observed in human labor supply curves. Like human consumers, rats showed elasticity of demand, consuming far more water per day when its price in effort was lower. The neural mechanisms underlying such “rational” market behaviors remain largely unexplored. We propose a dynamic utility maximization model that can account for the dependence of rat labor supply (trials/day) on the wage rate (milliliter/trial) and also predict the temporal dynamics of when rats work. Based on data from mice, we hypothesize that glutamatergic neurons in the subfornical organ in lamina terminalis continuously compute the instantaneous marginal utility of voluntary work for water reward and causally determine the amount and timing of work.
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Hu Y, van Wingerden M, Sellitto M, Schäble S, Kalenscher T. Anterior Cingulate Cortex Lesions Abolish Budget Effects on Effort-Based Decision-Making in Rat Consumers. J Neurosci 2021; 41:4448-4460. [PMID: 33753545 PMCID: PMC8152606 DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2541-20.2021] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/29/2020] [Revised: 02/26/2021] [Accepted: 02/27/2021] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Demand theory can be applied to analyze how animal consumers change their selection of commodities in response to changes in commodity prices, given budget constraints. Previous work has shown that demand elasticities in rats differed between uncompensated budget conditions in which the budget available to be spent on the commodities (e.g., the finite number of discrete operants to "purchase" rewards in two-alternative fixed-ratio schedules) was kept constant, and compensated budget conditions in which the budget was adjusted so that consumers could potentially continue to obtain the original reward bundles. Here, we hypothesized that rat anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was necessary to produce this budget effect on demand elasticities. We applied excitotoxic or sham lesions to ACC in rats performing an effort task in which the prices of liquid vanilla or chocolate rewards (the effort required to obtain rewards) and the budget (the total number of operants) was manipulated. When reward prices changed, and the budget was compensated, all rats adjusted their demand for chocolate and vanilla accordingly. In sham-lesioned rats, changes in demand were even more pronounced when the budget was not compensated for the price changes. By contrast, ACC-lesioned animals did not show this additional budget effect. An in-depth comparison of the rats' choice patterns showed that, unlike sham rats, ACC-lesioned animals failed to maximize session-bundle utility after price/budget changes, revealing deficits in higher-order choice-strategy adaptations. Our results suggest a novel role of ACC in considering purchasing power during complex cost-benefit value computations.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is important for allocating effort in cost-benefit calculations in animals and humans. Economic theory prescribes that the value of the costs in cost-benefit analyses not only depends on the net nominal costs required to purchase a reward, but also on the available budget resources, i.e., on the budget's "purchasing value." We asked whether ACC, a region implicated in effort-based decision-making and reward comparisons, is required for computing the value of effort relative to a budget constraint. Applying demand theory to describe rat choices in a rodent effort allocation task with varying effort prices and budgets, we show that ACC integrity was necessary for computing purchasing power, a core variable in economic choice theory.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yue Hu
- Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 40225, Germany
| | - Marijn van Wingerden
- Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Tilburg 5037 AB, The Netherlands
| | - Manuela Sellitto
- Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 40225, Germany
| | - Sandra Schäble
- Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 40225, Germany
| | - Tobias Kalenscher
- Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 40225, Germany
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Sweis BM, Thomas MJ, Redish AD. Beyond simple tests of value: measuring addiction as a heterogeneous disease of computation-specific valuation processes. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2018; 25:501-512. [PMID: 30115772 PMCID: PMC6097760 DOI: 10.1101/lm.047795.118] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/07/2018] [Accepted: 07/06/2018] [Indexed: 12/13/2022]
Abstract
Addiction is considered to be a neurobiological disorder of learning and memory because addiction is capable of producing lasting changes in the brain. Recovering addicts chronically struggle with making poor decisions that ultimately lead to relapse, suggesting a view of addiction also as a neurobiological disorder of decision-making information processing. How the brain makes decisions depends on how decision-making processes access information stored as memories in the brain. Advancements in circuit-dissection tools and recent theories in neuroeconomics suggest that neurally dissociable valuation processes access distinct memories differently, and thus are uniquely susceptible as the brain changes during addiction. If addiction is to be considered a neurobiological disorder of memory, and thus decision-making, the heterogeneity with which information is both stored and processed must be taken into account in addiction studies. Addiction etiology can vary widely from person to person. We propose that addiction is not a single disease, nor simply a disorder of learning and memory, but rather a collection of symptoms of heterogeneous neurobiological diseases of distinct circuit-computation-specific decision-making processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brian M Sweis
- Graduate Program in Neuroscience and Medical Scientist Training Program, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.,Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
| | - Mark J Thomas
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.,Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
| | - A David Redish
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
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