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| University of Cambridge > School of the Biological Sciences > Department of Experimental Psychology > Academic Staff |
A. Dickinson, FRSProfessor of Comparative Psychology, Tel: 01223 333577 email:ad15@cam.ac.uk
My current research interests lie in three areas:
I have enduring interest in goal-directed action based on the belief that that the capacity for such action is the most fundamental behavioural marker of cognition (Dickinson & Balleine, 2000). By goal-directed action, I refer to those actions that are mediated by: 1) instrumental knowledge of the causal relationship between the action and the outcome or goal; and 2) the current goal or incentive value of the outcome.
Instrumental knowledge. We have investigated the nature of the knowledge underlying instrumental action by assessing the concordance between human judgements of the causal effectiveness of an action and performance (Dickinson & Shanks, 1995). The capacity for goal-directed action does not appear to developed before the third year in children (Klossek, Russell, & Dickinson, 2008), possible due to the underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which plays an important role in encoding causal contingency between action and outcome (B. W. Balleine & Dickinson, 1998). In a collaboration with Cecilia Heyes (University College London) we have been investigating the processes mediated response-outcome learning and found that in a human effect priming paradigm pretraining with one outcome can block learning about a second outcome (Flach, Osman, Dickinson, & Heyes, 2006)
Incentive learning. Bernard Balleine (UCLA) and I have developed a two-process theory of the motivation of instrumental behaviour (Dickinson & Balleine, 2002) The first process reflects the standard motivational effect of Pavlovian stimuli, which appears to be mediated by the dopamine (DA) system (Dickinson, Smith, & Mirenowicz, 2000) possibly operating through the central nucleus of the amygdala (Hall, Parkinson, Connor, Dickinson, & Everitt, 2001) and the nucleus accumbens (de Borchgrave, Rawlins, Dickinson, & Balleine, 2002). The second, instrumental incentive process determines the incentive value of the outcome of the basis of the hedonic reactions that it elicits. Both humans and other animals have to learn about this incentive value and the way in which it is modulated by motivational state. In the case of food outcomes, both the vmPFC (Valentin, Dickinson, & O'Doherty, 2007) and the insular cortex (Balleine & Dickinson, 2000), but possibly not the basolateral amydala (Balleine, Killcross, & Dickinson, 2003), plays an important role in storing and deploying instrumental incentive value. Those actions that are distal to the outcome of an action sequence show greater control by the second, incentive learning process (Balleine, Paredes-Olay, & Dickinson, 2005)
Drug seeking. Collaborations with Barry Everitt (University of Cambridge), Dora Duka (University of Sussex), and Lee Hogarth (University of Nottingham) have established that both these incentive process also play a role in drug seeking. Evidence for the Pavlovian process comes from studies of nicotine seeking by smokers (Hogarth, Dickinson, & Duka, 2003; Hogarth, Dickinson, & Duka, 2005; Hogarth, Dickinson, Hutton, Elbers, & Duka, 2006; Hogarth, Dickinson, Wright, Kouvaraki, & Duka, 2007), whereas revaluation of cocaine (Olmstead, Lafond, Everitt, & Dickinson, 2001) and heroin (Hellemans, Dickinson, & Everitt, 2006; Hutcheson, Everitt, Robbins, & Dickinson, 2001) taking indicates that seeking these drugs can be a goal-directed action controlled by the incentive value of the opportunity to take these drugs. However, in the case of instrumental responding for oral alcohol (Dickinson, Wood, & Smith, 2002) and cocaine (Miles, Everitt, Dally, & Dickinson, 2004; Miles, Everitt, & Dickinson, 2003), performance is independent of the incentive value of the drug and appears to be habitual. Moreover, there is evidence that the overtraining of cocaine self-administration leads to compulsive drug seeking (Pelloux, Everitt, & Dickinson, 2007)
Control processes. Recent research has focused in control processes in the resolution of conflict in instrumental action. The induction of conflict can produced regression to habitual control (de Wit, Niry, Wariyar, Aitken, & Dickinson, 2007) through the engagement of dmPFC control processes (de Wit, Kosaki, Balleine, & Dickinson, 2006)Balleine, B., & Dickinson, A. (2000). The effect of lesions of the insular cortex on instrumental conditioning: Evidence for a role in incentive learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 20, 8954-8964.
Balleine, B. W., & Dickinson, A. (1998). Goal-directed instrumental action: contingency and incentive learning and their cortical substrates. Neuropharmacology, 37, 407-419.
Balleine, B. W., Killcross, A. S., & Dickinson, A. (2003). The Effect of Lesions of the Basolateral Amygdala on Instrumental Conditioning. Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 666-675.
Balleine, B. W., Paredes-Olay, C., & Dickinson, A. (2005). Effects of outcome devaluation on the performance of a heterogeneous instrumental chain. . International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 18, 257-272.
de Borchgrave, R., Rawlins, J. N. P., Dickinson, A., & Balleine, B. (2002). Effects of cytotoxic nucleus accumbens lesions on instrumental conditioning. Experimental Brain Research, 144, 50-68.
de Wit, S., Kosaki, Y., Balleine, B. W., & Dickinson, A. (2006). Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Resolves Response Conflict in Rats. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 5224-5229.
de Wit, S., Niry, D., Wariyar, R., Aitken, M. R. F., & Dickinson, A. (2007). Stimulus–Outcome Interactions During Instrumental Discrimination Learning by Rats and Humans. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 33, 1-11.
Dickinson, A., & Balleine, B. (2002). The role of learning in the operation of motivational systems. In H. Pashler & R. Gallistel (Eds.), Stevens' handbook of Experimental Psychology (Third ed., Vol. 3: Learning, motivation, and emotion, pp. 497-533). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Dickinson, A., & Balleine, B. W. (2000). Causal cognition and goal-directed action. In C. Heyes & L. Huber (Eds.), The evolution of cognition (pp. 185-204). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dickinson, A., & Shanks, D. R. (1995). Instrumental action and causal representation. In D. Sperber, D. Premack & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition (pp. 5-25). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dickinson, A., Smith, J., & Mirenowicz, J. (2000). Dissociation of Pavlovian and instrumental incentive learning under dopamine antagonists. Behavioral Neuroscience, 114, 468-483.
Dickinson, A., Wood, N., & Smith, J. W. (2002). Alcohol seeking by rats: Action or habit? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 331-348.
Flach, R., Osman, M., Dickinson, A., & Heyes, C. (2006). The interaction between response effects during the acquisition of response priming. Acta Psychologica, 122, 11-26.
Hall, J., Parkinson, J. A., Connor, T. M., Dickinson, A., & Everitt, B. J. (2001). Involvement of the central nucleus of the amydala and nucleus accumbens core in mediating Pavlovian influences on instrumental behaviour. European Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 1992-2001.
Hellemans, K. G. C., Dickinson, A., & Everitt, B. J. (2006). Motivational control of heroin seeking by conditioned stimuli associated with withdrawal and heroin taking by rats. Behavioral Neuroscience, 120, 103-114.
Hogarth, L., Dickinson, A., & Duka, T. (2003). Discriminative stimuli that control instrumental tobacco-seeking by human smokers also command selective attention. Psychopharmacology, 168, 534-445.
Hogarth, L., Dickinson, A., & Duka, T. (2005). Explicit knowledge of stimulus-outcome contingencies and stimulus control of selective attention and instrumental action in human smoking behaviour. Psychopharmacology, 177, 428-437.
Hogarth, L., Dickinson, A., Hutton, S. B., Elbers, N., & Duka, T. (2006). Drug expectancy is necessary for stimulus control of human attention, instrumental drug-seeking behaviour and subjective pleasure. Psychopharmacology, 185.
Hogarth, L., Dickinson, A., Wright, A., Kouvaraki, M., & Duka, T. (2007). The role of drug expectancy in the control of human drug seeking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 33, 484-496.
Hutcheson, D. M., Everitt, B. J., Robbins, T. W., & Dickinson, A. (2001). The role of withdrawal in heroin addiction: enhances reward or promotes avoidance? Nature Neuroscience, 4, 943-947.
Klossek, U. M. H., Russell, J., & Dickinson, A. (2008). The control of instrumental action following outcome devaluation in young children aged between 1 and 4 years. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 39-51.
Miles, F. J., Everitt, B. J., Dally, J. D., & Dickinson, A. (2004). Conditioned activity and instrumental reinforcement following long-term oral consumption of cocaine by rats. Behavioral Neuroscience, 118, 1331-1339.
Miles, F. J., Everitt, B. J., & Dickinson, A. (2003). Oral Cocaine Seeking by Rats: Action or Habit? Behavioral Neuroscience, 117, 927-938.
Olmstead, M. C., Lafond, M. V., Everitt, B. J., & Dickinson, A. (2001). Cocaine-seeking by rats is a goal directed action. Behavioral Neuroscience, 115, 394-402.
Pelloux, Y., Everitt, B. J., & Dickinson, A. (2007). Compulsive drug seeking by rats under punishment: effects of drug taking history. Psychopharmacology, 194, 127-137.
Valentin, V. V., Dickinson, A., & O'Doherty, J. P. (2007). Determining the Neural Substrates of Goal-Directed Learning in the Human Brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 4019-4026.
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