How does the dorsal striatum contribute to active choice rejection?

Choice rejection is an important part of decision making with high clinical relevance for addiction. Our goal is to understand how neural circuits are engaged during active rejection. This question is largely understudied due to a focus on choice omission, freezing, or stopping in animal studies of behavioral control. Similarly, two-alternative forced choice studies of decision making also fail to isolate active rejection from acceptance since these two aspects of decision making occur in parallel in these tasks. To better isolate active rejection, we adapted a serial decision-making task, Restaurant Row, in which mice decide to either accept or reject reward offers as they traverse four interconnected T-mazes. Mice report accept choices by turning right for an opportunity to receive a food pellet or turn left to actively reject an offer and continue to the next T-junction. Fiber photometry recordings were used to compare dSPN or iSPN activity preceding reject choices at each T-junction in Restaurant Row. We also recorded from these same mice in a two-arm bandit (2ABT) task.