Ettenberg Aaron
Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, United States.
Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 2009 Jan;91(3):271-7. doi: 10.1016/j.pbb.2008.11.003. Epub 2008 Nov 13.
Behavioral scientists have employed operant runways as a means of investigating the motivational impact of incentive stimuli for the better part of the past 100 years. In this task, the speed with which a trained animal traverses a long straight alley for positive incentive stimuli, like food or water, provides a reliable index of the subject's motivation to seek those stimuli. The runway is therefore a particularly appropriate tool for investigating the drug-seeking behavior of animals working for drugs of abuse. The current review describes our laboratory's work over the past twenty years developing and implementing an operant runway model of drug self-administration. Procedures are described that methodologically dissociate the antecedent motivational processes that induce an animal to seek a drug, from the positive reinforcing consequences of actually earning the drug. Additional work is reviewed on the use of the runway method as a means of modeling the factors that often result in a "relapse" of drug self-administration after a period of abstinence (i.e., a response reinstatement test), as are runway studies that revealed the presence of opposing positive and negative consequences of self-administered cocaine. This body of work suggests that the runway method has served as a powerful behavioral tool for the study of the behavioral and neurobiological basis of drug self-administration.
在过去100年的大部分时间里，行为科学家一直使用操作性跑道作为一种手段，来研究激励刺激的动机影响。在这个任务中，一只经过训练的动物为了诸如食物或水等积极激励刺激穿越一条长长的直通道的速度，提供了该受试者寻求这些刺激的动机的可靠指标。因此，跑道是研究为滥用药物而工作的动物的觅药行为的特别合适的工具。当前的综述描述了我们实验室在过去二十年里开发和实施药物自我给药操作性跑道模型的工作。描述了一些程序，这些程序在方法上把诱导动物寻求药物的先前动机过程，与实际获得药物的积极强化后果区分开来。还综述了关于使用跑道方法作为一种手段来模拟那些经常导致在一段时间禁欲后药物自我给药“复发”的因素的额外工作（即反应恢复测试），以及揭示自我给药可卡因存在相反的积极和消极后果的跑道研究。这一系列工作表明，跑道方法已成为研究药物自我给药的行为和神经生物学基础的有力行为工具。
