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Recruitment and disruption of ventral pallidal cue encoding during alcohol seeking
Author(s) -
Ottenheimer David J.,
Wang Karen,
Haimbaugh Alexandria,
Janak Patricia H.,
Richard Jocelyn M.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.14527
Subject(s) - psychology , ventral pallidum , neuroscience , stimulus (psychology) , classical conditioning , associative learning , associative property , stimulus control , basal ganglia , conditioning , cognitive psychology , globus pallidus , central nervous system , nicotine , statistics , mathematics , pure mathematics
Abstract A critical area of inquiry in the neurobiology of alcohol abuse is the mechanism by which cues gain the ability to elicit alcohol use. Previously, we found that cue‐evoked activity in rat ventral pallidum robustly encodes the value of sucrose cues trained under both Pavlovian and instrumental contingencies, despite a stronger relationship between cue‐evoked activity and behavioral latency after instrumental training (Richard et al., 2018, Elife , 7 , e33107). Here, we assessed: (a) ventral pallidal representations of Pavlovian versus instrumental cues trained with alcohol reward, and (b) the impact of non‐associative alcohol exposure on ventral pallidal representations of sucrose cues. Decoding of cue identity based on ventral pallidum firing was blunted for the Pavlovian alcohol cue in comparison to both the instrumental cue trained with alcohol and either cue type trained with sucrose. Further, non‐associative alcohol exposure had opposing effects on ventral pallidal encoding of sucrose cues trained on instrumental versus Pavlovian associations, enhancing decoding accuracy for an instrumental discriminative stimulus and reducing decoding accuracy for a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus. These findings suggest that alcohol exposure can drive biased engagement of specific reward‐related signals in the ventral pallidum.