Abstract
Humans are motivated to seek information from their environment. How the brain motivates this behavior is unknown. One speculation is that the brain employs neuromodulatory systems implicated in primary reward-seeking, in particular dopamine, to instruct information-seeking. However, there has been no causal test for the role of dopamine in information-seeking. Here, we show that administration of a drug that enhances dopamine function (dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine; L-DOPA) reduces the impact of valence on information-seeking. Specifically, while participants under Placebo sought more information about potential gains than losses, under L-DOPA this difference was not observed. The results provide new insight into the neurobiology of information-seeking and generates the prediction that abnormal dopaminergic function (such as in Parkinson’s disease) will result in valence-dependent changes to information-seeking.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e59152 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-14 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | eLife |
| Volume | 9 |
| Early online date | 2 Dec 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Funding
The research was funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship 214268/Z/18/Z to TS. We thank Lili Lantos and Sims Witherspoon for assistance in collecting data; Rick Adams for providing medical support; Bastian Blain, Irene Cogliati Dezza, Laura Katharina Globig and Christopher Kelly for providing comments on a previous version of the manuscript. This study has been approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (Project ID Number: 8127/001).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Wellcome Trust | 214268, 214268/Z/18/Z |