The underlying pathologies of psychiatric disorders, which cause substantial personal and
social losses, remain unknown, and their elucidation is an urgent issue. To clarify the core …

Over the last few decades, advances in human and animal‐based techniques have greatly
enhanced our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders …

Learned associations between environmental cues and the outcomes they predict (cue-
outcome associations) play a major role in behavioral control, guiding not only which …

The ability to learn Pavlovian associations from environmental cues predicting positive
outcomes is critical for survival, motivating adaptive behaviours. This cued-motivated …

Extrasynaptic GABAA receptors (GABAARs) composed of α4, β, and δ subunits mediate
GABAergic tonic inhibition and are potential molecular targets in the modulation of …

Dopamine (DA) is critically involved in different functions of the central nervous system
(CNS) including control of voluntary movement, affect, reward, sleep, and cognition. One of …

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a critical component of a limbic basal ganglia circuit that is
thought to play an important role in decision-making and the processing of rewarding stimuli …

The ability to use environmental cues to flexibly guide responses is crucial for adaptive
behavior and is thought to be controlled within a series of cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo …

While sign-tracking, also known as autoshaping, has been studied for many decades, only
recently has the tendency to show sign-tracking behavior been linked to the development …

To optimize decision making, animals need to execute not only a strategy to choose a good
option but sometimes also one to avoid a bad option. A psychological study indicates that …