ArticleBiological psychiatry2016
Reward Anticipation Is Encoded Differently by Adolescent Ventral Tegmental Area Neurons.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Adolescent Dopamine Neurons Represent Reward Differently during Action and State Guided Learning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
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- Dopamine Modulation of Prefrontal Cortex Activity Is Manifold and Operates at Multiple Temporal and Spatial Scales.Cell reports · 2019Article
- Effects of amphetamine exposure during adolescence on behavior and prelimbic cortex neuron activity in adulthood.Brain research · 2018Article
- Age and sex differences in behavioral flexibility, sensitivity to reward value, and risky decision-making.Behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
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- Methylphenidate has nonlinear dose effects on cued response inhibition in adults but not adolescents.Brain research · 2017Article
- Networks of VTA Neurons Encode Real-Time Information about Uncertain Numbers of Actions Executed to Earn a Reward.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2017Article
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4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundElucidating the neurobiology of the adolescent brain is fundamental to our understanding of the etiology of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and addiction, the symptoms of which often manifest during this developmental period. Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are strongly implicated in adolescent behavioral and psychiatric vulnerabilities, but little is known about how adolescent VTA neurons encode information during motivated behavior.
methodsWe recorded daily from VTA neurons in adolescent and adult rats during learning and maintenance of a cued, reward-motivated instrumental task and extinction from this task.
resultsDuring performance of the same motivated behavior, identical events were encoded differently by adult and adolescent VTA neurons. Adolescent VTA neurons with dopamine-like characteristics lacked a reward anticipation signal and showed a smaller response to reward delivery compared with adults. After extinction, however, these neurons maintained a strong phasic response to cues formerly predictive of reward opportunity.
conclusionsAnticipatory neuronal activity in the VTA supports preparatory attention and is implicated in error prediction signaling. Absence of this activity, combined with persistent representations of previously rewarded experiences, may provide a mechanism for rash decision making in adolescents.
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