Contribution of dopamine to risk attitude across the lifespan

描述（由申请人提供）：我们社会中的个人需要做出复杂的经济选择，通常具有不确定的结果，通过整合大量可用的信息来告知这些选择。在生命的各个阶段每天都需要做出决策，加上寿命的延长以及社会中最年轻和最年长的成员越来越容易获得信息，因此评估各年龄组在决策方面的潜在差异成为一个关键的研究领域。在具有确定和不确定结果的竞争选项中做出有利选择是个人对奖励结果的主观评估以及基于预测信息准确估计这些结果所需的强化学习过程的产物。因此，神经经济学的决策框架下的风险纳入贡献的年龄相关的区别在主观评价和强化学习提供了一个强大的工具，洞察整个生命周期的选择行为的基础。拟议工作的主要目标是建立行为和神经生物学的决策下的风险在整个生命周期的配置文件，并检查主观奖励估值和强化学习的贡献，这些配置文件在不同的生命阶段。我们假设，从青春期到成年期和衰老的多巴胺信号的发育/成熟变化是选择行为的一个基本因素，通过年龄特异性编码这些重要组成部分的决策装置。我们提出了三个具体的目标，研究在概率决策，强化学习和主观奖励评估在青少年，成年和老年大鼠腹侧纹状体多巴胺信号。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Individuals in our society are required to make complex economic choices, often with uncertain outcomes, by integrating large amounts of information available to inform those choices. This daily requirement for decision making at all stages of life, together with increasing life spans and a growing accessibility to information among the youngest and eldest members of society, makes an evaluation of potential differences in decision making across age groups a critical area of research. Choosing advantageously among competing options with certain and uncertain outcomes is a product of individual subjective valuation of rewarding outcomes and the reinforcement learning processes required for accurately estimating those outcomes based on predictive information. Accordingly, a neuroeconomic framework of decision making under risk incorporating the contribution of age-related distinctions in subjective valuation and reinforcement learning provides a powerful tool for insight into the underlying substrates of choice behavior across the lifespan. The primary goal of the proposed work is to establish behavioral and neurobiological profiles of decision making under risk across the lifespan and examine the contribution of subjective reward valuation and reinforcement learning to these profiles at different life stages. We hypothesize that developmental/maturational changes in dopamine signaling from adolescence through adulthood and senescence is a fundamental contributor to choice behavior through the age-specific encoding of these essential components to the decision-making apparatus. We propose three specific aims examining dopamine signaling in the ventral striatum during probabilistic decision making, reinforcement learning, and subjective reward valuation in adolescent, adult, and aged rats.