Prefrontal Norepinephrine Determines Attribution of “High” Motivational Salience

Rossella Ventura, Emanuele Claudio Latagliata, Cristina Morrone, Immacolata La Mela and Stefano Puglisi-Allegra

PLOS ONE, 2008, vol. 3, issue 8, 1-10

Abstract: Intense motivational salience attribution is considered to have a major role in the development of different psychopathologies. Numerous brain areas are involved in “normal” motivational salience attribution processes; however, it is not clear whether common or different neural mechanisms also underlie intense motivational salience attribution. To elucidate this a brain area and a neural system had to be envisaged that were involved only in motivational salience attribution to highly salient stimuli. Using intracerebral microdialysis, we found that natural stimuli induced an increase in norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice proportional to their salience, and that selective prefrontal norepinephrine depletion abolished the increase of norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex induced by exposure to appetitive (palatable food) or aversive (light) stimuli independently of salience. However, selective norepinephrine depletion in the medial prefrontal cortex impaired the place conditioning induced exclusively by highly salient stimuli, thus indicating that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines approach or avoidance responses to both reward- and aversion-related natural stimuli only when the salience of the unconditioned natural stimulus is high enough to induce sustained norepinephrine outflow. This affirms that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines motivational salience attribution selectively when intense motivational salience is processed, as in conditions that characterize psychopathological outcomes.

Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003044 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 03044&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0003044

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003044

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().