ArticleFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2019
Increased Goal Tracking in Adolescent Rats Is Goal-Directed and Not Habit-Like.
Article in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genetic Modulation of Oxycodone Self-Administration Trajectories: From Initiation to Escalating Burst Patterns.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Genetic modulation of oxycodone self-administration trajectories: from initiation to escalating burst patterns.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Fractionating impulsivity and reward-related phenotypes in adolescent mice.Behavioural brain research · 2025Article
- Maturation of striatal dopamine supports the development of habitual behavior through adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Reward-Mediated, Model-Free Reinforcement-Learning Mechanisms in Pavlovian and Instrumental Tasks Are Related.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Propensity for risky choices despite lower cue reactivity in adolescent rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Quantifying the instrumental and noninstrumental underpinnings of Pavlovian responding with the Price equation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Review
- Differential Dopamine Dynamics in Adolescents and Adults.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Incubation of Oxycodone Craving Following Adult-Onset and Adolescent-Onset Oxycodone Self-Administration in Male Rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Reward-predictive cues elicit excessive reward seeking in adolescent rats.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Basolateral Amygdala to Nucleus Accumbens Communication Differentially Mediates Devaluation Sensitivity of Sign- and Goal-Tracking Rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Does learning history shape the associability of outcomes? Further tests of the outcome predictability effect.PloS one · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
When a cue is paired with reward in a different location, some animals will approach the site of reward during the cue, a behavior called goal tracking, while other animals will approach and interact with the cue itself: a behavior called sign tracking. Sign tracking is thought to reflect a tendency to transfer incentive salience from the reward to the cue. Adolescence is a time of heightened sensitivity to rewards, including environmental cues that have been associated with rewards, which may account for increased impulsivity and vulnerability to drug abuse. Surprisingly, however, studies have shown that adolescents are actually less likely to interact with the cue (i.e., sign track) than adult animals. We reasoned that adolescents might show decreased sign tracking, accompanied by increased apparent goal tracking, because they tend to attribute incentive salience to a more reward-proximal "cue": the food magazine. On the other hand, adolescence is also a time of enhanced exploratory behavior, novelty-seeking, and behavioral flexibility. Therefore, adolescents might truly express more goal-directed reward-seeking and less inflexible habit-like approach to a reward-associated cue. Using a reward devaluation procedure to distinguish between these two hypotheses, we found that adolescents indeed exhibit more goal tracking, and less sign tracking, than a comparable group of adults. Moreover, adolescents' goal tracking behavior is highly sensitive to reward devaluation and therefore goal-directed and not habit-like.
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