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Updated: Jul 7, 2025

Operant Procedures for Assessing Behavioral Flexibility in Rats
Published on: February 15, 2015
Prefrontal Dopamine in Flexible Adaptation to Environmental Changes: A Game for Two Players
Emanuele Claudio Latagliata1, Cristina Orsini1,2, Simona Cabib1,2
1I.R.C.C.S. Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00143 Rome, Italy.
Abstract:
Deficits in cognitive flexibility have been characterized in affective, anxiety, and neurodegenerative disorders. This paper reviews data, mainly from studies on animal models, that support the existence of a cortical-striatal brain circuit modulated by dopamine (DA), playing a major role in cognitive/behavioral flexibility. Moreover, we reviewed clinical findings supporting misfunctioning of this circuit in Parkinson's disease that could be responsible for some important non-motoric symptoms. The reviewed findings point to a role of catecholaminergic transmission in the medial prefrontal cortex (mpFC) in modulating DA's availability in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), as well as a role of NAc DA in modulating the motivational value of natural and conditioned stimuli. The review section is accompanied by a preliminary experiment aimed at testing weather the extinction of a simple Pavlovian association fosters increased DA transmission in the mpFC and inhibition of DA transmission in the NAc.
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