Journal
ENEURO
Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0414-18.2019
Keywords
goal tracking; nucleus accumbens; Pavlovian conditioning; reinforcement learning; sign tracking
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R03DA045913]
- University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Competitive Medical Research Fund Award
- Brain AMP
- Behavior Research Organization [25185]
- Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
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During Pavlovian conditioning, if a cue (e.g., lever extension) predicts reward delivery in a different location (e.g., a food magazine), some individuals will come to approach and interact with the cue, a behavior known as sign tracking (ST), and others will approach the site of reward, a behavior known as goal tracking (GT). In rats, the acquisition of ST versus GT behavior is associated with distinct profiles of dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), but it is unknown whether it is associated with different patterns of accumbens neural activity. Therefore, we recorded from individual neurons in the NAc core during the acquisition, maintenance, and extinction of ST and GT behavior. Even though NAc dopamine is specifically important for the acquisition and expression of ST, we found that cue-evoked excitatory responses encode the vigor of both ST and GT behavior. In contrast, among sign trackers only, there was a prominent decrease in reward-related activity over the course of training, which may reflect the decreasing reward prediction error encoded by phasic dopamine. Finally, both behavior and cue-evoked activity were relatively resistant to extinction in sign trackers, as compared with goal trackers, although a subset of neurons in both groups retained their cue-evoked responses. Overall, the results point to the convergence of multiple forms of reward learning in the NAc.
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