Disentangling pleasure from incentive salience and learning signals in brain reward circuitry.

ABSTRACT: Multiple signals for reward-hedonic impact, motivation, and learned associative prediction-are funneled through brain mesocorticolimbic circuits involving the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. Here, we show how the hedonic "liking" and motivation "wanting" signals for a sweet reward are distinctly modulated and tracked in this circuit separately from signals for Pavlovian predictions (learning). Animals first learned to associate a fixed sequence of Pavlovian cues with sucrose reward. Subsequent intraaccumbens microinjections of an opioid-stimulating drug increased the hedonic liking impact of sucrose in behavior and firing signals of ventral pallidum neurons, and likewise, they increased incentive salience signals in firing to the reward-proximal incentive cue (but did not alter fir

SUBMITTER: Smith KS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3131314 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature