Topic: Appetitive behaviours

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) encompassing dopaminergic (DA) neurons, is a brain region crucial for processing information about various rewards and guiding appetitive behaviours directed towards them. Importantly, how the VTA DA neurons encode different rewards and to what extent this information overlaps within different DA cells is poorly understood.For that reason, we recorded the electrophysiological activity of VTA neurons in freely-behaving male mice using silicon probes while the animals were free to spontaneously explore different rewards. The arena contained several natural reward