Abstract
Dopamine has been critically implicated in learning and motivation, although its precise role remains to be determined. In order to investigate the involvement of dopamine in learning and motivation for a food reward, we used dopamine transporter knockdown mice (DAT KD) that have chronically elevated levels of extracellular dopamine. The present study demonstrates that chronically elevated dopamine enhances tendency to work for a food reward without apparent effects on Pavlovian and operant learning for this reward. The increase in dopamine is associated with elevated levels of dynorphin and Fos B expression in the dorsal caudate-putamen and the core but not the shell subregion of the nucleus accumbens. These data suggest that motivation to work, but not learning, for a food reward appears to be under the critical influence of tonic dopaminergic activity in discrete brain areas relevant for a reward-directed behavior.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by NIMH Grant MH66216 to XZ, Tourette Syndrome Association Fellowship to BC, NIMH Grant MH068073 to PB and NIDA Grant DA015210 to PB. We thank Dr Kent Berridge for helpful suggestions throughout the experiments and Dr Nobuyoshi Suto for critical reading of the manuscript. Jessica Klein, Lindsay Miller, Diana Park, Mary Shaw and Ali Hussain helped with various aspects of the experiments.
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Cagniard, B., Balsam, P., Brunner, D. et al. Mice with Chronically Elevated Dopamine Exhibit Enhanced Motivation, but not Learning, for a Food Reward. Neuropsychopharmacol 31, 1362–1370 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.npp.1300966
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.npp.1300966
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