Cocaine-induced decisionmaking deficits are mediated by miscoding in basolateral amygdala

Addicts and drug-experienced animals have decision-making deficits in reversal-learning tasks and more complex 'gambling' variants. Here we show evidence that these deficits are mediated by persistent encoding of outdated associative information in the basolateral amygdala. Cue-selective neurons in the basolateral amygdala, recorded in cocaine-treated rats, failed to change cue preference during reversal learning. Further, the presence of these neurons was critical to the expression of the reversal-learning deficit in the cocaine-treated rats.