What Neurobiology Has to Say About Why People Abuse Alcohol and Other Drugs
Richard T. Spence, Diana M. DiNitto, Shulamith Lala Ashenberg Straussner in Neurobiology of Addictions, 2014
Beyond its role in inducing an animal to engage in goal directed activity, the “incentive-salience” system also plays a role in enhancing an animal’s capacity to learn new associations. When the incentive-salience system is activated, an animal more readily acquires information about the significance of new cues signaling the availability of reward. That is, it becomes easier to develop associations between new conditioned stimuli and a reinforcer, and it is harder to extinguish responses to previously conditioned stimuli. Latent inhibition, the phenomenon wherein a stimulus with which the animal is very familiar cannot acquire new positive or negative associations, is more easily overcome. Conditioned stimuli for a broad range of reinforcers (sex and food) have a stronger directing effect on the animal’s behavior (Berridge & Robinson, 1998; Robinson & Berridge, 1993).
Psychology and Human Development EMIs
Michael Reilly, Bangaru Raju in Extended Matching Items for the MRCPsych Part 1, 2018
Conditional reinforcer.Contextual stimuli.Contrived reinforcer.Counterconditioning.Extinction.Latent inhibition.Natural reinforcer.Postconditioning revaluation of the unconditioned stimulus.Second-order conditioning.
Transplacental Cocaine Exposure: Behavioral Consequences
Richard J. Konkol, George D. Olsen in Prenatal Cocaine Exposure, 2020
One paradigm that evaluates animal attention is latent inhibition (LI). Latent inhibition describes a process by which a series of nonreinforced exposures to a stimulus retards conditioning to that stimulus when it is subsequently paired with a reinforcing event.52 The preexposed stimulus is called the latent inhibitor, and the resulting retardation of conditioning is called the latent inhibition effect. The animal learns that the preexposed stimulus does not predict an important event, such that when the stimulus is rendered important by being paired with a reinforcing event, the animals must first overcome a learned attentional bias before conditioning can occur.53 This interpretation of LI is supported by studies showing that LI is an associative process whereby the animal learns to ignore the preexposed stimulus.54–57
Experimental psychology meets behavioral ecology: what laboratory studies of learning polymorphisms mean for learning under natural conditions, and vice versa
Published in Journal of Neurogenetics, 2020
Brian H. Smith, Chelsea N. Cook
These results point to an almost counterintuitive effect of the gene (s), potentially at LRN1/PLN2, that could unify the learning and pollen phenotypes. One interpretation for Latent Inhibition is that it reflects a process of ‘attention’ (Lubow, 1989). Animals attend to new stimuli, and that attention is strengthened or attenuated once it is clear whether or not those stimuli are associated with anything of consequence. This allows animals to focus potentially limited neural resources that underlie attention to stimuli on stimuli that are meaningful. In this interpretation, High line foragers show strong Latent inhibition and concomitantly strong processes of attention. They thus intensively focus on the exploitation of good resources in the local environment. Low line foragers are ‘less attentive’ and possibly more likely to locate new resources. Although, as a caveat, this explanation of the results is still only a hypothesis. Furthermore, that there is a process like attention in honey bees, or in any insect, still needs to be investigated in much more detail to establish to what extent it is, or isn’t, like that in mammals.
A review of potential neuropathological changes associated with ketamine
Published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety, 2022
Danica Nogo, Hana Nazal, Yuetong Song, Kayla M. Teopiz, Roger Ho, Roger S. McIntyre, Leanna M.W. Lui, Joshua D. Rosenblat
Overall, the preclinical studies showed a trend toward a reduction in PV expression or activity levels across disparate brain regions, relating to the mPFC and/or hippocampus, following either acute or chronic ketamine administration. The reduction within the mPFC, a brain region responsible for executive functioning and consolidation of memory, may manifest as impairments in source and recognition memory, and fluency – as often observed in chronic ketamine users and patients with AD [74,75]. Additionally, the reduction of PV cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in the formation, organization, and storage of new memories, may also manifest as persisting deficits in overall cognition, including working memory performance and behavioral expression of latent inhibition – as seen in human long-term ketamine abusers, and both preclinical and clinical studies of schizophrenia (SCZ) or AD [53,74–76].
Innovative screening models for the discovery of new schizophrenia drug therapies: an integrated approach
Published in Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery, 2021
Marinos G. Sotiropoulos, Eleni Poulogiannopoulou, Foteini Delis, Christina Dalla, Katerina Antoniou, Nikolaos Kokras
Given the inherent difficulties in modeling schizophrenia symptoms, research has also focused on modeling endophenotypes. Endophenotypes, or intermediate phenotypes, are heritable traits giving subclinical signs and symptoms, which can frequently be observed in relatives of patients, as endophenotypes tend to co-segregate within families [21]. Α homologous behavioral (endo)phenotype that was believed to be specific for acute psychosis in both human patients and rodent models is reduced latent inhibition. Latent inhibition refers to the observation that, in classical conditioning, a preexposure to the conditioned stimulus results in delayed acquisition of a conditioned response, i.e. a familiar stimulus takes longer to acquire meaning [22]. It has been thought to be based primarily on the mesencephalic dopaminergic circuit, particularly the dopaminergic neurons innervating the core and shell of the nucleus accumbens, but also involves the entorhinal and prefrontal cortices, as well as the striatum and subiculum [22]. In humans, reduced latent inhibition is more common in the subset of patients with prominently positive symptoms (making it a nonspecific marker for all schizophrenia patients), but could be related to nonspecific defective learning, instead of psychosis in particular [23]. Moreover, prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex, in which a weaker prior sound inhibits the natural startle reflex to the stronger sound, is a different marker related to altered sensorimotor gating, that is present in other disorders as well [22]. Those endophenotypes can be reliably detected in experimental animals and serve as measures of information ‘gating’ – a function that filters information to the brain [24].
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