TY - JOUR T1 - Specific effect of dopamine partial agonist on counterfactual learning: evidence from Gilles de la Tourette syndrome JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/064345 SP - 064345 AU - Alexandre Salvador AU - Yulia Worbe AU - Cécile Delorme AU - Giorgio Coricelli AU - Raphaël Gaillard AU - Trevor W Robbins AU - Andreas Hartmann AU - Stefano Palminteri Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/17/064345.abstract N2 - The dopamine partial agonist aripiprazole is increasingly used to treat pathologies for which other antipsychotics are indicated, as it displays fewer side effects, such as sedation and depression-like symptoms, compared to other dopamine receptor antagonists.Previously, we showed that aripiprazole may protect motivational function, by preserving reinforcement-related signals used to sustain reward-maximisation behaviour in a simple action-outcome learning task. However, the effect of aripripazole on more abstract facets of human reinforcement learning, such as learning from the hypothethical outcomes of alternative course of actions (counterfactual learning), is unknown.To test the influence of aripripazole on counterfactual learning, we administrated to two groups of Gilles de la Tourette (GTS) patients (unmedicated and under aripiprazole monotherapy) and to healthy subjects a reinforcement-learning task that involves both direct learning from obtained outcomes and indirect learning from previous outcomes.We replicated a previous finding showing that aripiprazole does not affect direct learning. We also found that, whereas learning performance improved in presence of counterfactual feedback in both healthy controls and unmedicated GTS, this was not the case in aripiprazole-medicated GTS.Our results suggest that, whereas aripiprazole preserves direct learning of action-outcome associations, it may impair more complex inferential processes such as counterfactual learning. ER -