Negative symptoms of schizophrenia are debilitating and chronic in nature, are difficult to
treat, and contribute to poor functional outcomes. Motivational deficits are a core negative …

Successful decision making often requires weighing a given option's costs against its
associated benefits, an ability that appears perturbed in virtually every severe mental illness …

This experiment was conducted to study the role of nucleus accumbens dopamine in the
performance of a novel T-maze cost/benefit procedure. Rats were trained on a T-maze task …

Phasic increases and decreases in dopamine (DA) transmission encode reward prediction
errors thought to facilitate reward-related learning, yet how these signals guide action …

Two anatomically and neurochemically distinguishable regions of the nucleus accumbens
(Acb), the core and the shell, have been shown to differentially regulate feeding behavior …

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the basolateral amygdala (BLA), and the dopamine in
the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are part of a neural system that is critically involved in making …

Rats emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) that are thought to serve as situation-dependent
affective signals and accomplish important communicative functions. In appetitive situations …

Optimal decision-making is based on integrating information from several dimensions of
decisional space (eg, reward expectation, cost estimation, effort exertion). Despite …

Previous research has implicated dopamine as a modulating factor in choice behavior
based on effort. The purpose of the present study was to determine the individual …

Motivation can be characterized as a series of cost–benefit valuations, in which we weigh
the amount of effort we are willing to expend (the cost of an action) in return for particular …