Learning From One's Mistakes: A Dual Role for the Rostromedial Tegmental Nucleus in the Encoding and Expression of Punished Reward Seeking.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Psychiatric disorders such as addiction and mania are marked by persistent reward seeking despite highly negative or aversive outcomes, but the neural mechanisms underlying this aberrant decision making are unknown. The recently identified rostromedial tegmental nucleus (RMTg) encodes a wide variety of aversive stimuli and sends robust inhibitory projections to midbrain dopamine neurons, leading to the hypothesis that the RMTg provides a brake to reward signaling in response to aversive costs.

Methods

To test the role of the RMTg in punished reward seeking, adult male Sprague Dawley rats were tested in several cost-benefit decision tasks after excitotoxic lesions of the RMTg or temporally specific optogenetic inhibition of RMTg efferents in the ventral tegmental a

SUBMITTER: Vento PJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5400739 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature