Effects of an acute therapeutic or rewarding dose of amphetamine on acquisition of Pavlovian autoshaping and ventral striatal dopamine signaling.

Effects of an acute therapeutic or rewarding dose of amphetamine on acquisition of Pavlovian autoshaping and ventral striatal dopamine signaling. Behav Brain Res. 2017 Sep 04;: Authors: Schuweiler DR, Athens JM, Thompson JM, Vazhayil ST, Garris PA Abstract Rewarding doses of amphetamine increase the amplitude, duration, and frequency of dopamine transients in the ventral striatum. Debate continues at the behavioral level about which component of reward, learning or incentive salience, is signaled by these dopamine transients and thus altered in addiction. The learning hypothesis proposes that rewarding drugs result in pathological overlearning of drug-predictive cues, while the incentive sensitization hypothesis suggests that rewarding drugs result in sensitized attribution of incentive salience to drug-predictive cues. Therapeutic doses of amphetamine, such as those used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, are hypothesized to enhance the ventral striatal dopamine transients that are critical for reward-related learning and to enhance Pavlovian learning. However, the effects of therapeutic doses of amphetamine on Pavlovian learning are poorly understood, and the effects on dopamine transients are completely unknown. We determined the effects of an acute pre-training therapeutic or rewarding amphetamine injection on the acquisition of Pavlovian autoshaping in the intact rat. We also determined the effects of these doses...
Source: Behavioural Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research