ArticleBehavioural brain research2015
Sign-tracking to an appetitive cue predicts incubation of conditioned fear in rats.
Article in Behavioural brain research, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Genetic characterization of outbred Sprague Dawley rats and utility for genome-wide association studies.PLoS genetics · 2022Pooled it
- Genotype-dependent functional role of the anterior and posterior paraventricular thalamus in pavlovian conditioned approach.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Resting-state brain activation patterns and network topology distinguish human sign and goal trackers.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Leveraging individual differences in cue-reward learning to investigate the psychological and neural basis of shared psychiatric symptomatology: The sign-tracker/goal-tracker model.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- The propensity to sign-track is associated with externalizing behavior and distinct patterns of reward-related brain activation in youth.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Extended operant training increases infralimbic and prelimbic cortex Fos regardless of fear conditioning experience.Behavioural brain research · 2021Article
- Comment on Pohorala et al.: Sign-tracking as a predictor of addiction vulnerability.Psychopharmacology · 2021Article
- Incentive motivation: 'wanting' roles of central amygdala circuitry.Behavioural brain research · 2021Review
- Sign- and goal-tracking score does not correlate with addiction-like behavior following prolonged cocaine self-administration.Psychopharmacology · 2021Article
- A proposed role for glucocorticoids in mediating dopamine-dependent cue-reward learning.Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2021Article
- Sensitivity to food and cocaine cues are independent traits in a large sample of heterogeneous stock rats.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Mapping sign-tracking and goal-tracking onto human behaviors.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Neural circuits linking sleep and addiction: Animal models to understand why select individuals are more vulnerable to substance use disorders after sleep deprivation.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Mechanisms of Shared Vulnerability to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use Disorders.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Review
- Sign-tracking behavior is difficult to extinguish and resistant to multiple cognitive enhancers.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2019Article
- Sex differences in nicotine-enhanced Pavlovian conditioned approach in rats.Biology of sex differences · 2019Article
- Individual differences in voluntary alcohol consumption are associated with conditioned fear in the fear incubation model.Behavioural brain research · 2019Article
- Cell type-specific activation of mitogen-activated protein kinase in D1 receptor-expressing neurons of the nucleus accumbens potentiates stimulus-reward learning in mice.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Individual differences in conditioned fear are associated with levels of adolescent/early adult alcohol consumption and instrumental extinction.Behavioural brain research · 2018Article
- The hot 'n' cold of cue-induced drug relapse.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2018Review
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Although post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction are very different disorders, both are characterized by hyperreactivity to trauma- or drug-related cues, respectively. We investigated whether an appetitive conditioning task, Pavlovian conditioned approach, which predicts vulnerability to reinstatement of cocaine-seeking, also predicts fear incubation, which may be a marker for vulnerability to PTSD. We classified rats based on whether they learned to approach and interact with a food predictive cue (sign-trackers), or, whether upon cue presentation they went to the location of impending food delivery (goal-trackers). Rats were then exposed to extensive Pavlovian tone-shock pairings, which causes the fear response to increase or "incubate" over time. We found that the fear incubation effect was only present in sign-trackers. The behavior of goal-trackers was more consistent with a normal fear response-it was most robust immediately after training and decayed slowly over time. Sign-trackers also had lower levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) protein in the prefrontal cortex than goal-trackers. These results indicate that, while many factors likely contribute to the disproportionate co-occurrence of PTSD and substance abuse, one such factor may be a core psychological trait that biases some individuals to attribute excessive motivational significance to predictive cues, regardless of the emotional valence of those cues. High levels of BDNF in the prefrontal cortex may be protective against developing excessive emotional and motivational responses to salient cues.
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