Dopamine transients follow a striatal gradient of reward time horizons

Abstract

Animals make predictions to guide their behavior and update those predictions through experience. Transient increases in dopamine (DA) are thought to be critical signals for updating predictions. However, it is unclear how this mechanism handles a wide range of behavioral timescales—from seconds or less (for example, if singing a song) to potentially hours or more (for example, if hunting for food). Here we report that DA transients in distinct rat striatal subregions convey prediction errors based on distinct time horizons. DA dynamics systematically accelerated from ventral to dorsomedial to dorsolateral striatum, in the tempo of spontaneous fluctuations, the temporal integration of prior rewards and the discounting of future rewards. This spectrum of timescales for evaluative computations can help achieve efficient learning and adaptive motivation for a broad range of behaviors.