Orbitofrontal and Prelimbic Cortices Serve Complementary Roles in Adapting Reward Seeking to Learned Anxiety.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Anxiety is a common symptom of several mental health disorders and adversely affects motivated behaviors. Anxiety can emerge from associating risk of future harm while engaged in goal-guided actions. Using a recently developed behavioral paradigm to model this aspect of anxiety, we investigated the role of 2 cortical subregions, the prelimbic medial frontal cortex (PL) and lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC), which have been implicated in anxiety and outcome expectation, in flexible representation of actions associated with harm risk.

Methods

A seek-take reward-guided instrumental task design was used to train animals (N = 8) to associate the seek action with a variable risk of punishment. After learning, animals underwent extinction training for this association.

SUBMITTER: Jacobs DS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12057655 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature