Reward behaviour is regulated by the strength of hippocampus-nucleus accumbens synapses.

ABSTRACT: Reward drives motivated behaviours and is essential for survival, and therefore there is strong evolutionary pressure to retain contextual information about rewarding stimuli. This drive may be abnormally strong, such as in addiction, or weak, such as in depression, in which anhedonia (loss of pleasure in response to rewarding stimuli) is a prominent symptom. Hippocampal input to the shell of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is important for driving NAc activity^1,2 and activity-dependent modulation of the strength of this input may contribute to the proper regulation of goal-directed behaviours. However, there have been few robust descriptions of the mechanisms that underlie the induction or expression of long-term potentiation (LTP) at these synapses, and there is, to our knowledge,

SUBMITTER: LeGates TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6292781 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature