Publication Date:
2009-08-01
Description:
The ability to shift between different behavioral strategies is necessary for appropriate decision-making. Here, we show that chronic stress biases decision-making strategies, affecting the ability of stressed animals to perform actions on the basis of their consequences. Using two different operant tasks, we revealed that, in making choices, rats subjected to chronic stress became insensitive to changes in outcome value and resistant to changes in action-outcome contingency. Furthermore, chronic stress caused opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying these different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum. These data suggest that the relative advantage of circuits coursing through sensorimotor striatum observed after chronic stress leads to a bias in behavioral strategies toward habit.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Dias-Ferreira, Eduardo -- Sousa, Joao C -- Melo, Irene -- Morgado, Pedro -- Mesquita, Ana R -- Cerqueira, Joao J -- Costa, Rui M -- Sousa, Nuno -- Intramural NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Jul 31;325(5940):621-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1171203.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Health Sciences, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644122" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Atrophy
;
Cell Count
;
Choice Behavior
;
Chronic Disease
;
Corpus Striatum/*pathology
;
*Decision Making
;
Dendrites/pathology
;
Frontal Lobe/*pathology
;
Habits
;
Hypertrophy
;
Neural Pathways/pathology
;
Neurons/pathology
;
Prefrontal Cortex/pathology
;
Rats
;
Rats, Long-Evans
;
Rats, Wistar
;
Reinforcement (Psychology)
;
Stress, Psychological/*pathology/*psychology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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