正常衰老过程中眶额皮层对等待的意愿和时间贴现奖励的改变编码。
Willingness to wait and altered encoding of time-discounted reward in the orbitofrontal cortex with normal aging.
机构信息
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
出版信息
J Neurosci. 2012 Apr 18;32(16):5525-33. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0586-12.2012.
Normal aging has been associated with cognitive changes, including shifts in responding for time-discounted rewards. The orbitofrontal cortex, an area previously associated with aging-related cognitive changes, is critical for normal discounting. Previously we have shown in a choice task that rats prefer immediate over delayed reward and that neural representations of delayed reward in orbitofrontal cortex were attenuated, whereas immediate reward elicited strong responses. Changes in choice performance were correlated with changes in firing rate in orbitofrontal neurons, suggesting that these reward representations were critical to the rats' ability to wait for reward. Here we asked whether age-dependent changes in discounting behavior were related to changes in the representation of delayed reward in the orbitofrontal cortex. Young (3-6 months) and aged (22-26 months) rats were trained on the same discounting paradigm used previously. We found that aged rats showed less sensitivity to increasing delay preceding reward delivery, shifting behavior away from the delayed reward more slowly than younger rats. This sensitivity was specific to delay, since choice performance did not differ between the two groups when delay was held constant and reward size varied. Aged rats exhibited a corresponding increase in the prevalence of neurons that fired more strongly for delayed reward. Again this change was specific to delay; there was no change in encoding of different-sized rewards. These results suggest that natural aging results in altered representations of reward in orbitofrontal cortex. These changes may relate to the increased ability to delay gratification and reduced impulsivity associated with aging.
正常衰老与认知变化有关,包括对时间贴现奖励的反应变化。眶额皮层以前与与衰老相关的认知变化有关,对于正常的折扣至关重要。之前我们在一项选择任务中表明,大鼠更喜欢即时奖励而不是延迟奖励,并且眶额皮层中延迟奖励的神经表示减弱,而即时奖励则引起强烈的反应。选择性能的变化与眶额皮层神经元放电率的变化相关,这表明这些奖励表示对于大鼠等待奖励的能力至关重要。在这里,我们想知道折扣行为的年龄依赖性变化是否与眶额皮层中延迟奖励表示的变化有关。年轻(3-6 个月)和年老(22-26 个月)的大鼠在以前使用过的相同折扣范式上进行训练。我们发现,年老的大鼠对延迟奖励前的延迟增加的敏感性降低,其行为变化比年轻的大鼠更缓慢地转向延迟奖励。这种敏感性是特定于延迟的,因为当延迟保持不变而奖励大小变化时,两组之间的选择性能没有差异。年老的大鼠表现出对延迟奖励更强烈反应的神经元的出现频率增加。同样,这种变化是特定于延迟的;对不同大小的奖励的编码没有变化。这些结果表明,自然衰老导致眶额皮层中奖励表示的改变。这些变化可能与与衰老相关的延迟满足能力的提高和冲动性降低有关。