CiteULike: brembs' instrumental

Variation of bar-press duration: Where do new responses come from?

Seth Roberts — 2008-07-30T12:57:22-00:00

Proceedings of the Meeting of the Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior - SQAB 2005, Vol. 72, No. 3. (2006), 215-223.

Instrumental learning involves both variation and selection: variation of what the animal does, and selection by reward from among the variation. Four experiments with rats suggested a rule about how variation is controlled by recent events. Experiment 1 used the peak procedure. Measurements of bar-press durations showed a sharp increase in mean duration after the time that food was sometimes given. The increase was triggered by the omission of expected food. Our first explanation of the increase was that it was a frustration effect. Experiment 2 tested this explanation with a procedure in which the first response of a trial usually produced food, ending the trial. In Experiment 2, unlike Experiment 1, omission of expected food did not produce a large increase in bar-press duration, which cast doubt on the frustration explanation. Experiments 3 and 4 tested an alternative explanation: a decrease in expectation of reward increases variation. Both used two signals associated with different probabilities of reward. Bar presses were more variable in duration during the signal with the lower probability of reward, supporting this alternative. These experiments show how variation can be studied with ordinary equipment and responses.

Lesions of nucleus accumbens reduce instrumental but not consummatory negative contrast in rats

MH Leszczuk — 2008-07-30T12:56:06-00:00

Behavioural Brain Research, Vol. 116, No. 1. (2000), 61-79.

In Experiment 1, rats provided with brief daily access to 4% sucrose which preceded brief access to 32% sucrose (4-32) suppressed licking the 4% solution relative to 4-4 controls. This anticipatory negative contrast (ANC) was diminished when the 32% solution was downshifted to 4%. Licking the second 4% solution in shifted rats (4-32-4) was lower than licking of the second 4% solution in 4-4 control rats - a successive negative contrast (SNC) effect. Neither SNC nor ANC or their recovery were influenced by electrolytic lesions of the nucleus accumbens (NAC). Latency to initiate licking followed a concentration function, with rats initiating licking faster for 32 than 4% sucrose, but was not affected by the lesion. In Experiment 2, rats showed clear SNC in consummatory behavior when shifted from 32 to 4% sucrose and also showed SNC in running speed when shifted from a 12- to 1-pellet reward in a straight runway. As in Experiment 1, consummatory SNC was not affected by the lesion. However, in the runway, lesioned animals showed contrast later (after more trials) than the sham-lesioned rats and did not show contrast in the goal section, when goal speed was averaged across the postshift period. Reward downshift also increased the animals' tendency to backtrack in the runway and backtracking was greater in the lesioned rats during both the preshift and postshift periods. These data suggest that the NAC is not a necessary structure for the generation of expectancies, the comparison of rewards or the modulation of ingestive behavior. However, the NAC may be involved in responding to unmet expectancies when the task involves approach or instrumental behavior. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The misbehavior of value and the discipline of the will

Peter Dayan — 2008-07-30T12:54:09-00:00

Neural Networks, Vol. 19, No. 8. (2006), 1153-1160.

Most reinforcement learning models of animal conditioning operate under the convenient, though fictive, assumption that Pavlovian conditioning concerns prediction learning whereas instrumental conditioning concerns action learning. However, it is only through Pavlovian responses that Pavlovian prediction learning is evident, and these responses can act against the instrumental interests of the subjects. This can be seen in both experimental and natural circumstances. In this paper we study the consequences of importing this competition into a reinforcement learning context, and demonstrate the resulting effects in an omission schedule and a maze navigation task. The misbehavior created by Pavlovian values can be quite debilitating; we discuss how it may be disciplined.

Regulation of firing of dopaminergic neurons and control of goal-directed behaviors

Anthony Grace — 2007-04-04T14:05:09-00:00

Trends in Neurosciences, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

There are several brain regions that have been implicated in the control of motivated behavior and whose disruption leads to the pathophysiology observed in major psychiatric disorders. These systems include the ventral hippocampus, which is involved in context and focus on tasks, the amygdala, which mediates emotional behavior, and the prefrontal cortex, which modulates activity throughout the limbic system to enable behavioral flexibility. Each of these systems has overlapping projections to the nucleus accumbens, where these inputs are integrated under the modulatory influence of dopamine. Here, we provide a systems-oriented approach to interpreting the function of the dopamine system, its modulation of limbic-cortical interactions and how disruptions within this system might underlie the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and drug abuse.

Inducing motor skill improvements with a declarative task

Rachel Brown — 2007-01-27T11:53:32-00:00

Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 10, No. 2. (21 January 2007), pp. 148-149.

Neuronal Transcriptome of Aplysia: Neuronal Compartments and Circuitry

Leonid Moroz — 2007-01-03T10:18:42-00:00

Cell, Vol. 127, No. 7. (29 December 2006), pp. 1453-1467.

SummaryMolecular analyses of Aplysia, a well-established model organism for cellular and systems neural science, have been seriously handicapped by a lack of adequate genomic information. By sequencing cDNA libraries from the central nervous system (CNS), we have identified over 175,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs), of which 19,814 are unique neuronal gene products and represent 50%-70% of the total Aplysia neuronal transcriptome. We have characterized the transcriptome at three levels: (1) the central nervous system, (2) the elementary components of a simple behavior: the gill-withdrawal reflex--by analyzing sensory, motor, and serotonergic modulatory neurons, and (3) processes of individual neurons. In addition to increasing the amount of available gene sequences of Aplysia by two orders of magnitude, this collection represents the largest database available for any member of the Lophotrochozoa and therefore provides additional insights into evolutionary strategies used by this highly successful diversified lineage, one of the three proposed superclades of bilateral animals.