Reward coding at the Nucleus Accumbens

AZUL SILVA; MARIANO BELLUSCIO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd Congress of the Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience (FALAN); 2016

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }Nucleus Accumbens(NAc) has been implicated in evaluation and decision-makingprocesses, as an interface between motivation and action. Thisnucleus receives projections from motor cortices, assosiativecortices involved in decision-making, limbic areas (as thehippocampus and amygdala) and from dopaminergic neurons. NAc neuronsare sensible to a reward?s type and volume, that means they areable to discriminate different types of rewards. But how reward?svalue is encoded in this area? In addition to their type or volume,rewards are associated with different types of costs (such as delaysor uncertainty about its obtaining). These costs affect the perceivedvalue of the rewards (subjective value). To understand how this areaencodes the subjective value of a reward, we studied the dynamicalchanges of the neuronal responses in NAc of Long Evans rats and theirbehavior during a task, that involves two rewards with differentvolume and delivery?s delay. Here we show that neurons in the NAccan modified their activity according to the animals preference forthe same reward.