| First Author | Lottem E | Year | 2018 |
| Journal | Nat Commun | Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 | Pages | 1000 |
| PubMed ID | 29520000 | Mgi Jnum | J:293017 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:6149330 | Doi | 10.1038/s41467-018-03438-y |
| Citation | Lottem E, et al. (2018) Activation of serotonin neurons promotes active persistence in a probabilistic foraging task. Nat Commun 9(1):1000 |
| abstractText | The neuromodulator serotonin (5-HT) has been implicated in a variety of functions that involve patience or impulse control. Many of these effects are consistent with a long-standing theory that 5-HT promotes behavioral inhibition, a motivational bias favoring passive over active behaviors. To further test this idea, we studied the impact of 5-HT in a probabilistic foraging task, in which mice must learn the statistics of the environment and infer when to leave a depleted foraging site for the next. Critically, mice were required to actively nose-poke in order to exploit a given site. We show that optogenetic activation of 5-HT neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus increases the willingness of mice to actively attempt to exploit a reward site before giving up. These results indicate that behavioral inhibition is not an adequate description of 5-HT function and suggest that a unified account must be based on a higher-order function. |
