Abstract
RationaleThe serotonin (5-HT) system has been reported to be involved in decision-making. A key component of this neurotransmitter system is the 5-HT1A receptor, and research is beginning to show how this receptor can influence decision-making. However, this relationship has rarely been studied in humans.ObjectivesThis study assessed whether individual variability in 5-HT1A availability correlates with decision-making in healthy volunteers.MethodsWe measured regional availability of the 5-HT1A receptor in the hippocampal complex and striatum using positron emission tomography and correlated this with performance on two decision-making tasks measuring sensitivity to probability, rewards and punishments and temporal discounting, respectively.ResultsNo relationship between decision-making behaviour and 5-HT1A availability in the striatum was found. However, a positive correlation was detected between participants’ 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex and their sensitivity to the probability of winning. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between the degree to which participants discounted future rewards and 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex.ConclusionsThese data support a role for the 5-HT1A receptor in the aberrant decision-making that can occur in neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00213-013-3426-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The serotonin (5-HT) system has been implicated in decisionmaking, with manipulations resulting in altered processing of rewards (Murphy et al 2002) and punishments (Cools et al 2008; Crockett et al 2009)
Pine Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel negative correlation between the degree to which participants discounted future rewards and 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex. These data support a role for the 5-HT1A receptor in the aberrant decision-making that can occur in neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression
In the voxel-wise analyses, positive correlations were identified between sensitivity to probability and 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex bilaterally, though only the correlation in the right survived small volume corrected (SVC) correction for multiple comparisons (right peak voxel: [x=20, y=0, z=−38], Z=3.63, PSVC=0.028 (Fig. 3); left peak voxel: [x=−16, y=−2, z=−34], Z= 3.21, PSVC= 0.089)
Summary
The serotonin (5-HT) system has been implicated in decisionmaking, with manipulations resulting in altered processing of rewards (Murphy et al 2002) and punishments (Cools et al 2008; Crockett et al 2009). Reduced 5-HT transmission has been implicated in impulsivity (Winstanley et al 2004), a component of which is temporal discounting, the tendency to devalue temporally distant rewards. Takahashi et al (2008) reported that depressed patients, in whom 5-HT transmission is hypothesized to be disrupted, exhibited elevated temporal discounting. Schultz et al (2000) demonstrated that neurons within the primate striatum fired in response to reward-predicting stimuli, while in humans Delgado et al (2000) reported that the dorsal striatum was active during monetary reward processing. With respect to impulsivity, Pine et al (2009) showed that delay discounting correlated
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