Chronic stress affects decision-making strategies: structural and physiological correlates
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1
NIAAA, NIH, Section on In Vivo Neural Function, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience, United States
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2
School of Health Sciences, University of Minho, Life and Health Sciences Research Institute, Portugal
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3
University of Coimbra, PhD Programme in Experimental Biology and Biomedicine (PDBEB), Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Portugal
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 based on their consequences. Using two different operant tasks, we uncovered that choices made by rats and mice submitted to chronic stress become insensitive to changes in outcome value and resistant to changes in action-outcome contingency. Furthermore, we found that chronic stress caused opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the associative striatum (dorsomedial striatum, DMS), and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum (dorsolateral striatum, DLS). In addition, we recorded the simultaneous activity of neuronal ensembles in mPFC, DMS and DLS of control and stressed mice during behavioral training and testing. This approach will allow us to investigate if the changes in wiring observed in the associative and sensorimotor circuits after chronic stress cause changes in neural activity in these circuits that could explain the bias in behavioral strategies towards habit.
Conference:
11th Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Neuroscience, Braga, Portugal, 4 Jun - 6 Jun, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Symposium 2 – Brain Networks
Citation:
Dias-Ferreira
E,
Melo
I,
Jin
X,
Sousa
JC,
Cerqueira
J,
Sousa
N and
Costa
RM
(2009). Chronic stress affects decision-making strategies: structural and physiological correlates.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
11th Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.01.2009.11.008
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Received:
05 Aug 2009;
Published Online:
05 Aug 2009.
*
Correspondence:
Eduardo Dias-Ferreira, NIAAA, NIH, Section on In Vivo Neural Function, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience, Bethesda, MD, United States, ferreiraed@mail.nih.gov