TY - JOUR
T1 - Dopaminergic medication increases reliance on current information in Parkinson's disease
AU - Vilares, Iris
AU - Kording, Konrad P.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/7/24
Y1 - 2017/7/24
N2 - The neurotransmitter dopamine is crucial for decision-making under uncertainty, but its computational role is still a subject of intense debate. To test its potential roles, we invited patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), who have less internally generated dopamine, to participate in a visual decision-making task in which uncertainty in both prior and current sensory information was varied. Behaviour during these tasks is often predicted by Bayesian statistics. We found that many aspects of uncertainty processing were conserved in PD patients: They could learn the prior uncertainty and utilize both prior and current sensory information. As predicted by prominent theories, we found that dopaminergic medication influenced the weight given to sensory information. However, as PD patients learned, this bias disappeared. In addition, throughout the experiment the patients exhibited lower sensitivity to current sensory uncertainty compared with age-matched controls. Our results provide empirical evidence for the idea that dopamine levels, which are affected by PD and the drugs used for its treatment, influence the reliance on new information.
AB - The neurotransmitter dopamine is crucial for decision-making under uncertainty, but its computational role is still a subject of intense debate. To test its potential roles, we invited patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), who have less internally generated dopamine, to participate in a visual decision-making task in which uncertainty in both prior and current sensory information was varied. Behaviour during these tasks is often predicted by Bayesian statistics. We found that many aspects of uncertainty processing were conserved in PD patients: They could learn the prior uncertainty and utilize both prior and current sensory information. As predicted by prominent theories, we found that dopaminergic medication influenced the weight given to sensory information. However, as PD patients learned, this bias disappeared. In addition, throughout the experiment the patients exhibited lower sensitivity to current sensory uncertainty compared with age-matched controls. Our results provide empirical evidence for the idea that dopamine levels, which are affected by PD and the drugs used for its treatment, influence the reliance on new information.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41562-017-0129
DO - 10.1038/s41562-017-0129
M3 - Article
C2 - 28804782
AN - SCOPUS:85034613323
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 1
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
IS - 8
M1 - 0129
ER -