Disentangling pleasure from incentive salience and learning signals in brain reward circuitry

摘要

Reward can be separated into several components, which in clude sensory pleasure (liking), incentive motivation triggered by related cues (wanting), and predictive associations that al low cues to raise expectations of the pleasure to come (learning). Attraction to food in the re frigerator when hungry, for example, involves learned pre dictions of tasty treats, motiva tion to eat, and finally, pleasure enjoyed on eating. In the brain, signals for each of these com ponents are funneled together through looping pathways con necting the nucleus accumbens with the ventral pallidum (VP), which form a circuit mediating motivation, behavior, and emo tions (1).