Parametric analysis of brain stimulation reward in the rat: I. The transient process and the memory-containing process.

Abstract

Rats ran an alley and pressed a lever for brain stimulation reward. At the end of the 10-min. intertrial interval, they received pretrial priming stimulation. Varying the amount (number of trains and number of pulses) of stimulation showed that both the lever-produced stimulation and the pretrial stimulation affected running speed. The 2 effects, however, had different parametric characteristics. An analysis of the transitional responses following changes in the amounts of stimulation further showed that one effect involved a memory for stimulation received on earlier trials, whereas the other effect did not. The experiment provided a paradigm for independently analyzing the 2 effects. A second experiment showed how this paradigm may be modified to permit automation of the entire procedure.

Conditioned Locomotion Is Not Correlated with Behavioral Sensitization to Cocaine An Intra-Laboratory Multi-Sample Analysis

“…This phenomenon has been replicated with various types of rewards. For example, rats will run faster down an alley to reach a chamber in proportion to the degree that the chamber is associated with prior exposure to rewarding electrical brain stimulation (Gallistel et al 1974) or to the reinforcing effects of heroin (McFarland and Ettenberg 1995).…”

Serotonin and Dopamine: Unifying Affective, Activational, and Decision Functions

“…Other authors writing from a similar tradition have provided a more general activational account, with parallel roles for DA in the dorsal and ventral striatum Everitt, 1982, 1992;Robbins and Everitt, 2007), stressing both a performance-based energetic component to DA and reinforcement-related functions more akin to those posited in the computational RL models, for example, conditioned reinforcement and stamping-in of stimulus-response habits (Wise, 2004). Indeed, early experimental work by Gallistel et al (1974) argued for both reinforcing and activational effects of (putatively dopaminergic) brain stimulation reward, distinguished as progressive and immediate effects of contingent versus noncontingent self-stimulation.…”

“…Echoing this idea, more recent RL theories link these aspects by claiming that DA is involved in learning which behaviors are associated with reward. Variants of the reward/action duality also underlie longstanding controversies about what psychological aspects of reward DA might subserveFfor instance, hedonics, reinforcement, or motivational and activational (Ikemoto and Panksepp, 1999;Berridge, 2007;Robbins and Everitt, 2007)Fand the question whether DA impacts behavior via learning versus performance (Gallistel et al, 1974;Berridge, 2007;Niv et al, 2007). We focus on this last question here.…”

Within-Session Decreases in Operant Responding as A Function of Pre-Session Feedings

“…Priming refers to an increase in effectiveness of a reinforcer when the subject is given noncontingent exposure to that reinforcer before an experimental session (McSweeney & Swindell, 1999). Priming has been demonstrated for many reinforcing stimuli, including drugs of abuse (de Wit, 1996), electrical stimulation of the brain (Gallistel, Stellar, & Bubis, 1974), and food (Cornell, Rodin, & Weingarten, 1989). Priming may be stimulus specific.…”