Cocaine self-administration abolishes associative neural encoding in the nucleus accumbens necessary for higher-order learning.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Cocaine use is often associated with diminished cognitive function, persisting even after abstinence from the drug. Likely targets for these changes are the core and shell of the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which are critical for mediating the rewarding aspects of drugs of abuse as well as supporting associative learning. To understand this deficit, we recorded neural activity in the NAc of rats with a history of cocaine self-administration or control subjects while they learned Pavlovian first- and second-order associations.

Methods

Rats were trained for 2 weeks to self-administer intravenous cocaine or water. Later, rats learned a first-order Pavlovian discrimination where a conditioned stimulus (CS)+ predicted food, and a control (CS-) did not. Rats then learned a

SUBMITTER: Saddoris MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3865233 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature