ArticlePsychopharmacology2021
Sign- and goal-tracking score does not correlate with addiction-like behavior following prolonged cocaine self-administration.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Incentive Salience, not Psychomotor Sensitization or Tolerance, Drives Escalation of Cocaine Self-Administration in Heterogeneous Stock Rats.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cocaine seeking and consumption are oppositely regulated by mesolimbic dopamine in male rats.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cell type-specific multi-omics analysis of cocaine use disorder in the human caudate nucleus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Sex-associated differences in incentive salience and drinking behaviour in a rodent model of alcohol relapse.Addiction biology · 2025Article
- The Continuing Challenges of Studying Parallel Behaviours in Humans and Animal Models.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Neurobehavioral Precursors of Compulsive Cocaine Seeking in Dual Frontostriatal Circuits.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- 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
- A mechanical task for measuring sign- and goal-tracking in humans: A proof-of-concept study.Behavioural brain research · 2023Article
- Motor impulsivity but not risk-related impulsive choice is associated to drug intake and drug-primed relapse.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Towards a machine-learning assisted diagnosis of psychiatric disorders and their operationalization in preclinical research: Evidence from studies on addiction-like behaviour in individual rats.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Article
- Investigating discriminative stimulus modulation of opioid seeking after conflict-induced abstinence in sign- and goal-tracking rats.Psychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Investigating individual differences in opioid-taking and opioid-seeking behavior in male rats.Psychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Comment on Pohorala et al.: Sign-tracking as a predictor of addiction vulnerability.Psychopharmacology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
rationaleIn classical conditioning, sign-tracking reflects behavior directed toward a conditioned stimulus (CS) in expectation of a reward (unconditioned stimulus, US); in contrast, goal-tracking describes behavior directed toward the location of delivery of a US. As cues previously paired with drugs of abuse promote drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior in both animals and humans and thus contribute to the severity of substance abuse, sign-tracking may represent a maladaptive cue-focused behavior that may increase addiction vulnerability as compared to goal-tracking. Recent studies do, in fact, support this possibility. Previous work in this area has focused primarily on paradigms using relatively limited exposure to drug rather than extended drug intake.
objectivesHere, we used the DSM-IV-based 3-criteria (3-CRIT) model and examined whether a relationship exists between sign- or goal-tracking phenotypes and the prevalence of criteria associated with addiction-like behavior following extended cocaine self-administration as measured in this model.
methodsForty-six male Sprague Dawley rats underwent a Pavlovian conditioned approach (PCA) procedure and were characterized along a continuum as goal-trackers (GTs), intermediates (INTs), or sign-trackers (STs). The animals were subsequently trained to intravenous self-administer cocaine during 45 self-administration (SA) sessions and characterized for the 3 criteria outlined in the model: persistence of drug-seeking, motivation for cocaine-taking, and resistance to punishment.
resultsWe performed correlational analyses on the traits measured, finding no relationships between PCA score and addiction-like characteristics measured using the 3-CRIT model of addiction. However, STs showed significantly greater resistance to punishment than GTs.
conclusionsPhenotyping along a continuum of PCA scores may not be a valid predictor for identifying vulnerability to the addiction-like behaviors examined using the 3-CRIT model. However, PCA phenotype may predict a single feature of the 3-CRIT model, resistance to punishment, among those rats classified as either STs or GTs.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.