Motivational drive

Tobacco smoking is a major contributor to the burden of mental health disease worldwide. Nicotine is the primary reinforcing and main addictive component of tobacco. Nicotine addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder associated with multiple psychiatric comorbidities, and few effective interventions currently exist to curb addiction to nicotine. The neurocircuitry underlying nicotine addiction is broad, complex and depends on the stages of the disease process. It is well-acknowledged that nicotine impacts the reward system with prominent alterations of the firing properties of VTA DA neurons c

…acquire information may be an innate motivational drive. We have developed a task in mice to study the neural mechanisms that compute the value of informative stimuli that drive information seeking. Mice are provided with odor cues in a center port that dictate entry into one of two side ports. The side ports offer water reward with identical probability and differ only in whether they provide an information odor cue that reveals the reward outcome. We