Dopamine dips during unrewarded actions promote punishment-resistant reward seeking

Authors

Mwenda, N., Nadel, J. A., Shen, T., Seiler, J. L., Lerner, T. N.

Abstract

Punishment-resistant reward-seeking, a hallmark of addiction, is less prominent in females than males. We found that chronic estradiol manipulations increased punishment resistance in female mice without increasing dopamine peaks on rewarded actions as expected, instead exaggerating dopamine dips on unrewarded actions; optogenetically mimicking these dips accelerated punishment resistance in females and males. These results suggest dopamine dips suppress learning from unrewarded actions, consistent with policy-based accounts of dopamine function.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 04 Aug 2026.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this preprint? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.