Chronic stress affects decision-making strategies: structural and physiological correlates
The stress response is vital to maintain homeostasis. However, chronic exposure to stress can trigger maladaptive response and predispose to conditions ranging from neuropsychiatric disorders to everyday lapses of attention. Even though previous reports have implicated chronic stress in executive function impairment, a conceivable role in decision-making processes remains to be clarified. Competing corticostriatal circuits are thought to control heterogeneous decision strategies: while the prelimbic (PL) cortex and the dorsomedial striatum (DMS, or associative striatum) have been implicated in goal-directed actions, the dorsolateral striatum (DLS, or sensorimotor striatum) has been implicated in automatic or habitual choices. Here we show that chronic stress impairs the decision-making process, predisposing to habitual behavior in detriment of goal-directed strategies. Using two different criteria to test for action-outcome behavior in a lever pressing task, we found that responses from rats and mice submitted to chronic stress became insensitive to both outcome devaluation and contingency degradation. Furthermore, we found that chronic stress causes opposing structural changes in associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits. Whereas chronic exposure to stress resulted in selective atrophy of pyramidal neurons in layer II/III of the PL and infralimbic (IL) sub-regions of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and in medium spiny neurons (MSNs) of the DMS, it triggered an opposite effect in MSNs of the DLS. To determine if this structural reorganization of frontostriatal circuits has functional consequences, 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 underlie changes in neural activity in these circuits that could explain the bias from goal-directed towards habitual behavior observed in stressed subjects.
Conference:
Computational and systems
neuroscience 2009, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 26 Feb - 3 Mar, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
(2009). Chronic stress affects decision-making strategies: structural and physiological correlates.
Front. Syst. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Computational and systems
neuroscience 2009.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.06.2009.03.348
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Received:
10 Feb 2009;
Published Online:
10 Feb 2009.