Anterior cingulate cortex lesions abolish budget effects on effort-based decision-making in rat consumers
Hu,Yue van Wingerden,Marijn Sellitto,Manuela Schäble,Sandra Kalenscher,Tobias
Hu,Yue
van Wingerden,Marijn
Sellitto,Manuela
Schäble,Sandra
Kalenscher,Tobias
Abstract
Demand theory can be applied to analyze how animal consumers change their selection of commodities in response to changes in commodity prices, given budget constraints. Previous work has shown that demand elasticities in rats differed between uncompensated budget conditions in which the budget available to be spent on the commodities (e.g., the finite number of discrete operants to “purchase” rewards in two-alternative fixed-ratio schedules) was kept constant, and compensated budget conditions in which the budget was adjusted so that consumers could potentially continue to obtain the original reward bundles. Here, we hypothesized that rat anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was necessary to produce this budget effect on demand elasticities. We applied excitotoxic or sham lesions to ACC in rats performing an effort task in which the prices of liquid vanilla or chocolate rewards (the effort required to obtain rewards) and the budget (the total number of operants) was manipulated. When reward prices changed, and the budget was compensated, all rats adjusted their demand for chocolate and vanilla accordingly. In sham-lesioned rats, changes in demand were even more pronounced when the budget was not compensated for the price changes. By contrast, ACC-lesioned animals did not show this additional budget effect. An in-depth comparison of the rats’ choice patterns showed that, unlike sham rats, ACC-lesioned animals failed to maximize session-bundle utility after price/budget changes, revealing deficits in higher-order choice-strategy adaptations. Our results suggest a novel role of ACC in considering purchasing power during complex cost-benefit value computations.
Description
Funding Information: Received Sep. 29, 2020; revised Feb. 26, 2021; accepted Feb. 27, 2021. Author contributions: Y.H., M.v.W., and T.K. designed research; Y.H. performed research; M.v.W., M.S., S.S., and T.K. contributed unpublished reagents/analytic tools; Y.H., M.v.W., M.S., and T.K. analyzed data; Y.H., M.v.W., M.S., S.S., and T.K. wrote the paper. This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grants DFG-HU 2690/2-1 (to Y.H.) and DFG KA 2675/5-3 (to T.K.). We thank John H. Kagel for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank Brian M. Sweis for his suggestion at SfN on the analyses. pY.H. and M.v.W. contributed equally to this work. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Correspondence should be addressed to Yue Hu at yue.hu@hhu.de. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2541-20.2021 Copyright © 2021 the authors Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2021 the authors
Date
2021-05-19
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Keywords
Anterior cingulate cortex, Budget, Cost-benefit decisions, Demand elasticity, Neuroeconomics, Rodents
Citation
Hu, Y, van Wingerden, M, Sellitto, M, Schäble, S & Kalenscher, T 2021, 'Anterior cingulate cortex lesions abolish budget effects on effort-based decision-making in rat consumers', Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 41, no. 20, pp. 4448-4460. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2541-20.2021