Dopamine Enhances Model-Based over Model-Free Choice Behavior

Abstract

Decision making is often considered to arise out of contributions from a model-free habitual system and a model-based goal-directed system. Here, we investigated the effect of a dopamine manipulation on the degree to which either system contributes to instrumental behavior in a two-stage Markov decision task, which has been shown to discriminate model-free from model-based control. We found increased dopamine levels promote model-based over model-free choice.