Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 106, Issue 30, Pages 12512-12517Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905874106
Keywords
incentive value; taste reactivity; instrumental conditioning; opioid receptors; basolateral amygdala
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [MH56446]
- National Institute on Drug Abuse [DA09359, DA05010]
- Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service
- [T32MH017140]
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It generally is assumed that a common neural substrate mediates both the palatability and the reward value of nutritive events. However, recent evidence suggests this assumption may not be true. Whereas opioid circuitry in both the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum has been reported to mediate taste-reactivity responses to palatable events, the assignment of reward or inventive value to goal-directed actions has been found to involve the basolateral amygdala. Here we found that, in rats, the neural processes mediating palatability and incentive value are indeed dissociable. Naloxone infused into either the ventral pallidum or nucleus accumbens shell blocked the increase in sucrose palatability induced by an increase in food deprivation without affecting the performance of sucrose-related actions. Conversely, naloxone infused into the basolateral amygdala blocked food deprivation-induced changes in sucrose-related actions without affecting sucrose palatability. This double dissociation of opioid-mediated changes in palatability and incentive value suggests that the role of endogenous opioids in reward processing does not depend on a single neural circuit. Rather, changes in palatability and in the incentive value assigned to rewarding events seem to be mediated by distinct neural processes.
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