Punishment insensitivity emerges from impaired contingency detection, not aversion insensitivity or reward dominance

We examined these hypotheses by applying several analysis strategies to the behaviour of rats (n = 48; 18 female) trained in a conditioned punishment task that permitted concurrent assessment of punishment, reward-seeking, and Pavlovian fear. We show that punishment insensitivity is a unique phenotype, unrelated to differences in reward-seeking and Pavlovian fear, and due to a failure of instrumental control. Subjects insensitive to punishment are afraid of aversive events, they are simply unable to change their behaviour to avoid them.
Source: eLife - Category: Biomedical Science Tags: Neuroscience Source Type: research