Investigating the Relationship Between Habitual Behavior and Punishment Resistance in Rats
Abstract
Addiction is brain disease that is characterized by the inability to stop behavior in the face of negative consequences. Despite addiction causing harm on a personal and societal level, treatments for addiction remain relatively limited. Understanding the behaviors and circuitry that drive compulsive behavior seen in addiction have begun to unveil how addictions form. In laboratories, compulsive behavior has been modeled in rodents using punishment resistance. Currently, there exists conflicting evidence implicating both goal-directed and habitual behaviors in the development of compulsive behavior. Here, I investigated if habitual behaviors are linked to compulsive behavior. One of the main reasons this particular question has remained unanswered is due to the fact that assessing habitual behavior, specifically with intravenous (IV) drugs has proven difficult. Therefore, we first developed a novel outcome devaluation via satiety approach to test for habits in rats self-administering IV cocaine. We validated this method in several ways, including the use of schedules of reinforcement and dorsostriatal lesions. Next, using this method, we found that punishment resistant rats showed greater use of habitual behavior than punishment sensitive rats in both males and females. We also found that punishment sensitive rats, if habitually seeking prior to punishment, would switch to a goal-directed strategy. Finally, we found that a random-interval 60 (RI60) schedule (previously shown to bias towards the use of habits) can drive increased resistance to punishment under some circumstances. This resistance seen in RI60-trained rats was driven by the disconnection between the seeking rate and reward rate that is generated by random-interval schedules. Additionally, in food self-administering male rats, we found that rats trained on random-ratio 20 (RR20) schedules were highly resistant to punishment, which seems to be driven by a goal-directed increased motivation for reward. Together, these data reveal that punishment resistance can be driven by either the goal-directed or habitual system.
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Citation
Jones, Bradley O'Neil (2023). Investigating the Relationship Between Habitual Behavior and Punishment Resistance in Rats. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /203065.