Similarly, amphetamine infusions into the NAc shell at the time of PIT significantly enhanced the transfer effect (Wyvell & Berridge, 2000). However, in both of these circumstances, the drug was present at the time of transfer, whereas in the present study and others (Ranaldi et al., 2009), animals were drug abstinent for 1 week prior to testing. Thus, the present findings suggest that repeated cocaine exposure may change the sensitivity of shell

neurons to PIT-related stimuli, a mechanism that may be gated by prolonged exposure to phasic DA release. Intriguingly, Selleck GSI-IX previous studies have shown that DA release in the NAc following cocaine infusions is largely confined to the shell (Aragona Galunisertib mw et al., 2008). Cocaine self-administration may thus result in inducing a shell-specific DA-dependent process in which animals become exquisitely sensitive to task-related stimuli and rewards, and thus may be at greater risk for subsequent relapse. Given these converging data, one model for these results that is in line with the present findings suggests a role of the NAc core

neurons in learning the motivational significance of cues early in learning, whereas the core may become less important after the associations are fully learned. The naive animals reported here show such a pattern; core neurons reliably encoded cue-related information and, further, the degree to which this was learned predicted success on later transfer. However, these neural representations did not appear very to modulate lever-pressing activity during PIT, suggesting a less essential role in expressing that behavior. Shell neurons showed a different pattern of activity in line with this model. Although not as involved with the encoding of cue-related information as the core, cells that were cue-modulated at the time of press were significantly correlated with performance

on transfer. If this model is correct, we would predict that transient inactivation of the core, but not shell, during learning would impair subsequent transfer, whereas inactivation of the shell, but not core, at the time of transfer would have a similar transfer-inhibiting effect. Previous work in this laboratory has also shown that, following cocaine abstinence, cue and task-related encoding are selectively potentiated in the core, but not the shell (Hollander & Carelli, 2005, 2007). However, in those studies, modulation was found for drug-related stimuli and responses, whereas in the present study, drug exposure altered encoding for non-drug (natural) reward during novel learning. Notably, in the earlier study, associative encoding for drug-related stimuli necessarily occurred while the cocaine was onboard, whereas in the present study, all animals had the opportunity to learn about Pavlovian and instrumental responses for natural reward while drug naive.