Sood Ankit, Richard Jocelyn M
Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455.
Medical Discovery Team on Addiction, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455.
bioRxiv. 2023 Jul 7:2023.07.05.547810. doi: 10.1101/2023.07.05.547810.
Goal-directed behavior relies on accurate mental representations of the value of expected outcomes. Disruptions to this process are a central feature of several neuropsychiatric disorders, including addiction. Goal-directed behavior is most frequently studied using instrumental paradigms paired with outcome devaluation, but cue-evoked behaviors in Pavlovian settings can also be goal-directed and therefore sensitive to changes in outcome value. Emerging literature suggests that male and female rats may differ in the degree to which their Pavlovian-conditioned responses are goal-directed, but interpretation of these findings is complicated by the tendency of female and male rats to engage in distinct types of Pavlovian responses when trained with localizable cues. Here, we used outcome devaluation via sensory-specific satiety to assess the behavioral responses in male and female Long Evans rats trained to respond to an auditory CS (conditioned stimulus) in a Pavlovian-conditioning paradigm. We found that satiety-induced devaluation led to a decrease in behavioral responding to the reward-predictive CS, with males showing an effect on both port entry latency and probability and females showing an effect only on port entry probability. Overall, our results suggest that outcome devaluation affects Pavlovian-conditioned responses in both male and female rats, but that females may be less sensitive to outcome devaluation.
目标导向行为依赖于对预期结果价值的准确心理表征。这一过程的中断是包括成瘾在内的几种神经精神疾病的核心特征。目标导向行为最常通过与结果贬值配对的工具性范式进行研究，但在巴甫洛夫条件设置中，线索诱发的行为也可以是目标导向的，因此对结果价值的变化敏感。新兴文献表明，雄性和雌性大鼠在其巴甫洛夫条件反应的目标导向程度上可能存在差异，但由于雌性和雄性大鼠在接受可定位线索训练时倾向于表现出不同类型的巴甫洛夫反应，这些发现的解释变得复杂。在这里，我们通过感官特异性饱腹感进行结果贬值，以评估在巴甫洛夫条件范式中训练对听觉条件刺激（CS）做出反应的雄性和雌性Long Evans大鼠的行为反应。我们发现，饱腹感诱导的贬值导致对奖励预测性CS的行为反应减少，雄性在端口进入潜伏期和概率上均表现出影响，而雌性仅在端口进入概率上表现出影响。总体而言，我们的结果表明，结果贬值会影响雄性和雌性大鼠的巴甫洛夫条件反应，但雌性可能对结果贬值不太敏感。
