Figure 5. Animals with ventral OFC lesions fail to represent expected uncertainty in reward delays.
We assessed whether BLA and ventral OFC lesions alter animals’ ability to form expectations about the timing of reward delivery. On each trial during all baseline conditions where the overall value of LV and HV options were equivalent, reward port entries were recorded in 1 s bins during the waiting period. There were no significant differences in the means of expected reward delivery times across groups (p=0.394). Similarly, the groups were matched in the total number of reward port entries (p=0.636) as shown in Figure 5—figure supplement 1. Whereas the distributions of reward-seeking times in BLA-lesioned animals were indistinguishable from control animals’ and the true delays (A–F), OFC-lesioned animals concentrated their reward port entries in the time interval corresponding to mean delays (G,H), suggesting that while these animals can infer the average outcome, they fail to represent the variance (i.e., expected uncertainty). We also considered the changes in waiting times across our task; these data are shown in Figure 5—figure supplement 1. Each bar in histogram plots represents mean frequency normalized to total number of reward port entries ±SEM.
Figure 5—figure supplement 1. Total number of reward port entries and changes in waiting time variances across task phases.
