Contrasting Roles of Basolateral Amygdala and Orbitofrontal Cortex in Impulsive Choice

By C. Winstanley, D. Theobald, Rudolf N. Cardinal, Trevor W. Robbins. Journal of Neuroscience, 2004

612 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA) share many reciprocal connections, and a functional interaction between these regions is important in controlling goal-directed behavior. However, their relative roles have proved hard to dissociate. Although injury to these brain regions can cause similar effects, it has been suggested that the resulting impairments arise through damage to different, yet converging, cognitive processes. Patients with OFC or amygdala lesions exhibit maladaptive decision making and aberrant social behavior often described as impulsive. Impulsive choice may be measured in both humans and rodents by evaluating intolerance to delay of reinforcement. Rats with excitotoxic lesions of the BLA and OFC were tested on such a delay-discounting procedure. Although lesions of the BLA increased choice of the small immediate reward, indicating greater impulsivity, OFC lesions had the opposite effect, increasing preference for the larger but delayed reward. The fact that the delay did not devalue the large reward to such an extent in OFC-lesioned animals supports the suggestion that the OFC is involved in updating the incentive value of outcomes in response to devaluation. In contrast, the BLA-lesioned animals markedly decreased their preference for the large reward when it was delayed, potentially because of an inability to maintain a representation of the reward in its absence. This is the first time that lesions to these two structures have produced opposite behavioral effects, indicating their distinct contributions to cognition.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da5861f93038283690c878322cd5d006ea8f3c68

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Citations in the corpus

Impulsivity, compulsivity, and top-down cognitive control. (2011, neutral): “Accordingly, it is not surprising that lesions of the basolateral amygdala exert qualitatively similar effects on impulsive choice as accumbens core lesions (Winstanley et al., 2004b).”
Gamma-band synchronization in the neocortex: novel analysis methods and their application to sensory and motivational systems (2013, background): “, 2009) and control over prepotent, impulsive responses to incentive stimuli ((Jones & Mishkin, 1972; Chudasama et al., 2003; Winstanley et al., 2004; Man et al., 2009), but see Chudasama et al.”
Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions. (2010, background): “This supports the observation of BLA involvement (Ghods-Sharifi et al., 2009; Winstanley et al., 2004) and joint ACC-BLA involvement (Floresco and Ghods- Sharifi, 2007) in the incorporation of decision costs into choice behavior.”
Separate Valuation Subsystems for Delay and Effort Decision Costs (2010, background): “…striatum and orbitofrontal cortex of rodents induce behavioral deficits during delaybased paradigms (Cardinal et al., 2001; Mobini et al., 2002; Winstanley et al., 2004; Rudebeck et al., 2006), and increased activity of the ventral striatum has often been reported with expected value and its…”
Mental fatigue: costs and benefits. (2008, background): “Like the OFC, the BLA codes (relative) reward value (Killcross et al., 1997), signals changes in stimulus–reward contingencies (Salinas et al., 1993; Corbit and Balleine, 2005), and provides information on the value of delayed rewards (Winstanley et al., 2004).”
ΔFosB Induction in Orbitofrontal Cortex Mediates Tolerance to Cocaine-Induced Cognitive Dysfunction (2007, methodology): “Details of the training procedures and testing equipment have been provided in previous reports (Chudasama et al., 2003; Winstanley et al., 2004) and are also available in supplemental data (available at www.jneurosci.org as supplemental material).”
Prefrontal executive and cognitive functions in rodents: neural and neurochemical substrates. (2004, methodology): “It has been proposed that reversal learning represents a relatively loworder rule, that is, a rule based on object valence with no change in perceptual processing [72,129].”
Neural systems of reinforcement for drug addiction: from actions to habits to compulsion (2005, background): “Basolateral amygdala lesions, like nucleus accumbens core lesions, increase the choice of small, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards—indicating greater impulsivit”
Behavioral models of impulsivity in relation to ADHD: Translation between clinical and preclinical studies (2006, positive): “…in rats is less clear, as lesions to the serotonergic system have been reported to both increase impulsivity and to have no effect on performance of a delay-discounting paradigm (Bizot, Le Bihan, Puech, Hamon, & Thiebot, 1999; Mobini et al., 2000; Winstanley et al., 2003, 2004; Wogar et al., 1993).”
NEUROBIOLOGY OF ECONOMIC CHOICE: A GOOD-BASED MODEL (2011, background): “Specifically, Winstanley et al. (2004) found that rats with OFC lesions are more patient than control animals, whereas Mobini et al. (2002) found the opposite effect.”