Sign and goal tracker rats process differently the incentive salience of a conditioned stimulus.

ABSTRACT: Sign and goal tracker animals show different behavioral patterns in response to conditioned stimuli, which may be driven by different neural circuits involved in processing stimuli. Here, we explored whether sign and goal-tracker profiles implicated different brain regions and responses to incentive salience of stimuli. We performed three experiments using male Wistar rats. Experiment 1 showed that lesioning the medial prefrontal cortex increased the prevalence of the goal-tracker phenotype. Experiment 2 assessed the developmental trajectory of the salience incentive attribution to a conditioned stimulus, showing that increased incentive salience of stimuli increased the prevalence of the sign-tracker phenotype in mature, but not preadolescent rats. In experiment 3, the functional impact o

SUBMITTER: Serrano-Barroso A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6768469 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature