ArticleNature communications2017
Inhibiting Rho kinase promotes goal-directed decision making and blocks habitual responding for cocaine.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neuromodulators of orbitofrontal cortex function: A review of endocannabinoid, neurotrophin, and cell adhesion systems.Neurobiology of disease · 2026Review
- Drug target prediction from perturbation transcriptomics via a biological function-guided hypergraph siamese network.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Induction of more severe central sensitization in a medication overuse headache model mice through active ingestion of rizatriptan.The journal of headache and pain · 2025Article
- Remission from addiction: erasing the wrong circuits or making new ones?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- The Small G-Protein Rac1 in the Dorsomedial Striatum Promotes Alcohol-Dependent Structural Plasticity and Goal-Directed Learning in Mice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Adaptive Responding to Stimulus-Outcome Associations Requires Noradrenergic Transmission in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Substance Addiction Rehabilitation Drugs.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Neuronal Ensembles in the Amygdala Allow Social Information to Motivate Later Decisions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Making and breaking habits: Revisiting the definitions and behavioral factors that influence habits in animals.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2024Review
- Training-induced circuit-specific excitatory synaptogenesis in mice is required for effort control.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Subunit-selective PI3-kinase control of action strategies in the medial prefrontal cortex.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2023Article
- Cocaine and habit training cause dendritic spine rearrangement in the prelimbic cortex.iScience · 2023Article
- Developmental pyrethroid exposure causes a neurodevelopmental disorder phenotype in mice.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- The potential therapeutic roles of Rho GTPases in substance dependence.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2023Article
- Discriminating goal-directed and habitual cocaine seeking in rats using a novel outcome devaluation procedure.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Prelimbic cortex neural encoding dynamically tracks expected outcome value.Physiology & behavior · 2022Article
- Inter-individual variability amplified through breeding reveals control of reward-related action strategies by Melanocortin-4 Receptor in the dorsomedial striatum.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Long-term memory, synaptic plasticity and dopamine in rodent medial prefrontal cortex: Role in executive functions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- Article
- MicroRNA-31-3p/RhoA signaling in the dorsal hippocampus modulates methamphetamine-induced conditioned place preference in mice.Psychopharmacology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The prelimbic prefrontal cortex is necessary for associating actions with their consequences, enabling goal-directed decision making. We find that the strength of action-outcome conditioning correlates with dendritic spine density in prelimbic cortex, suggesting that new action-outcome learning involves dendritic spine plasticity. To test this, we inhibited the cytoskeletal regulatory factor Rho kinase. We find that the inhibitor fasudil enhances action-outcome memory, resulting in goal-directed behavior in mice that would otherwise express stimulus-response habits. Fasudil transiently reduces prelimbic cortical dendritic spine densities during a period of presumed memory consolidation, but only when paired with new learning. Fasudil also blocks habitual responding for cocaine, an effect that persists over time, across multiple contexts, and depends on actin polymerization. We suggest that Rho kinase inhibition promotes goal-oriented action selection by augmenting the plasticity of prelimbic cortical dendritic spines during the formation of new action-outcome memories.
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Registered trials
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.