Learning From One's Mistakes: A Dual Role for the Rostromedial Tegmental Nucleus in the Encoding and Expression of Punished Reward Seeking

摘要

BACKGROUND: Psychiatric disorders such as addiction and mania are marked by persistent reward seeking despite highly negative or aversive outcomes, but the neural mechanisms underlying this aberrant decision making are unknown. The recently identified rostromedial tegmental nucleus (RMTg) encodes a wide variety of aversive stimuli and sends robust inhibitory projections to midbrain dopamine neurons, leading to the hypothesis that the RMTg provides a brake to reward signaling in response to aversive costs.