Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA; Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Brain Res. 2022 Jun 15;1785:147885. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2022.147885. Epub 2022 Mar 17.
The insula has become a significant brain region in the study of both normal and impaired behavior and decision-making and has emerged as an important contributor to drug addiction. Consistent with this literature, in a previous study, we found that neural signals in rat insula encode anticipation and contextual global reward value during performance of an odor-guided delay/size choice task, and that these signals are disrupted by prior cocaine self-administration. Still, it is unknown if insula is critical for performance of this task under normal circumstances. Here, we sought to elucidate the functional role of these signals by lesioning the same region of anterior insula we previously recorded from. In addition to examining behavior during decision-making, we characterized behavior during autoshaping to further assess insula's role in behavior. We found insula damage resulted in reduced accuracy and faster reaction times, without affecting rats' choice of high-value reward, and that insula lesions reduced sign-tracking behavior. These results suggest that insula contributes to our odor-guided delay/size choice task via mechanisms that impact the control that environmental stimuli have on behavior.
脑岛在正常和受损行为以及决策的研究中已成为一个重要的大脑区域，并且已成为药物成瘾的重要贡献者。与该文献一致，在之前的一项研究中，我们发现大鼠脑岛中的神经信号在执行气味引导的延迟/大小选择任务时编码预期和上下文全局奖励值，并且这些信号被先前的可卡因自我给药所破坏。尽管如此，尚不清楚脑岛在正常情况下是否对执行此任务至关重要。在这里，我们试图通过损伤我们之前记录的前脑岛的相同区域来阐明这些信号的功能作用。除了检查决策过程中的行为外，我们还对自动塑造过程中的行为进行了特征描述，以进一步评估脑岛在行为中的作用。我们发现，脑岛损伤导致准确性降低和反应时间加快，但不影响大鼠对高价值奖励的选择，并且脑岛损伤减少了信号追踪行为。这些结果表明，脑岛通过影响环境刺激对行为的控制来影响我们的气味引导的延迟/大小选择任务。
