ArticleeLife2017
Risk of punishment influences discrete and coordinated encoding of reward-guided actions by prefrontal cortex and VTA neurons.
Article in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience.Nature communications · 2026Article
- VTA-forebrain connectivity moderates adaptive behavior.Brain structure & function · 2026Review
- dCA1 cells encode and update contextual place preference.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dopaminergic projections to the prefrontal cortex are critical for rapid threat avoidance learning.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Theta oscillation synchronize VTA and mPFC during ethanol-induced conditioned place preference and stress-evoked anxiety.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Volitional Regulation and Transferable Patterns of Midbrain Oscillations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Acetylcholine modulates prefrontal outcome coding during threat learning under uncertainty.eLife · 2025Article
- Remission from addiction: erasing the wrong circuits or making new ones?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Characterization of neuronal oscillations in the prelimbic cortex, nucleus accumbens and CA1 hippocampus during object retrieval task in rats predisposed to early life stress.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2024Article
- Monosynaptic ventral tegmental area glutamate projections to the locus coeruleus enhance aversive processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Orbitofrontal and Prelimbic Cortices Serve Complementary Roles in Adapting Reward Seeking to Learned Anxiety.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- Delay of punishment highlights differential vulnerability to developing addiction-like behavior toward sweet food.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Medial prefrontal cortex suppresses reward-seeking behavior with risk of punishment by reducing sensitivity to reward.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- The PFC-LH-VTA pathway contributes to social deficits in IRSp53-mutant mice.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Article
- Prefrontal cortex neurons in adult rats exposed to early life stress fail to appropriately signal the consequences of motivated actions.Physiology & behavior · 2023Article
- Rhythmic oscillations in the midbrain dopaminergic nuclei in mice.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Actions motivated by rewards are often associated with risk of punishment. Little is known about the neural representation of punishment risk during reward-seeking behavior. We modeled this circumstance in rats by designing a task where actions were consistently rewarded but probabilistically punished. Spike activity and local field potentials were recorded during task performance simultaneously from VTA and mPFC, two reciprocally connected regions implicated in reward-seeking and aversive behaviors. At the single unit level, we found that ensembles of putative dopamine and non-dopamine VTA neurons and mPFC neurons encode the relationship between action and punishment. At the network level, we found that coherent theta oscillations synchronize VTA and mPFC in a bottom-up direction, effectively phase-modulating the neuronal spike activity in the two regions during punishment-free actions. This synchrony declined as a function of punishment probability, suggesting that during reward-seeking actions, risk of punishment diminishes VTA-driven neural synchrony between the two regions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.