Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages 819-832Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhw398
Keywords
addiction; cocaine; choice; orbitofrontal cortex; preference
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Funding
- French National Agency [ANR-12-SAMA-003 01, ANR- 2010-BLAN-1404-01]
- French Research Council (CNRS)
- Universite de Bordeaux
- NRJ Foundation
- Conseil Regional d'Aquitaine [CRA11004375/11004699, CRA20101301022]
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Cocaine addiction is a harmful preference for drug use over and at the expense of other nondrug-related activities. Here we identify in the rat orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) a mechanism that explains individual preferences between cocaine use and an alternative, nondrug action. OFC neuronal activity was recorded while rats performed each of these 2 actions separately or while they chose between them. First, we found that these actions are encoded by 2 nonoverlapping neuronal populations and that the relative size of the cocaine population represented individual preferences. A larger relative size was only observed in cocaine-preferring individuals. Second, OFC neurons encoding a given individual's preferred action progressively fired more than other action-coding neurons few seconds before the preferred action was actually chosen, suggesting a prechoice neuronal competition for action selection. In cocaine-preferring rats, this manifested by a prechoice ramping-up activity in favor of the cocaine population. Finally, pharmacological manipulation of prechoice activity in favor of the cocaine population caused nondrug-preferring rats to shift their choice to cocaine. Overall, this study suggests that an individual preference for cocaine is represented in the OFC by a population size bias that systematically advantages cocaine use-coding neurons during prechoice competition for action selection.
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