The Effects of Lesions of the Hippocampus or Orbitofrontal Cortex on an Operant Box Based Intertemporal Choice Task in Mice

Intertemporal choices involve decisions between costs and benefits that will occur at different times. Usually agents have to decide between an earlier, smaller reward and a larger, delayed reward. The neurobiology and genetics of intertemporal choice is poorly understood and a better understanding...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of neuroscience, psychology, and economics psychology, and economics, 2011-11, Vol.4 (4), p.217-234
Main Authors: Finger, Beate C., Deacon, Robert M. J., Burns, Peter, Campbell, Thomas G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal
Brain Lesions (Experimental)
Choice Behavior
Female
Hippocampus
Impulsiveness
Mice
Neuropsychology
Orbitofrontal Cortex
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Summary:Intertemporal choices involve decisions between costs and benefits that will occur at different times. Usually agents have to decide between an earlier, smaller reward and a larger, delayed reward. The neurobiology and genetics of intertemporal choice is poorly understood and a better understanding requires the creation of sensitive, high throughput behavioral tasks. Here we report the effects of lesions of the hippocampus (HPC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) on an operant intertemporal choice task for mice. As this study, to the best of our knowledge, represents the first attempt to lesion the OFC in mice, the mice were also tested on a battery of tasks so as to build a behavioral profile of murine OFC lesions. Lesions of the HPC promoted self-controlled choice whereas lesions of the OFC had no effect on the operant intertemporal choice task. We also demonstrated that lesions of the HPC, but not the OFC, cause anxiolysis and deficits in spontaneous alternation. We have developed an operant intertemporal choice task for mice. We demonstrated that lesions of the HPC facilitate self-controlled choice and conjecture that this may be because the animals treated the task as a choice between a small, easy reward and a larger but more effortful reward rather than as an intertemporal choice task. This leads to the surprising conclusion that HPC-lesioned animals ignore the delay costs associated with effortful actions. If this is the case then HPC-lesioned animals should show marked departures from transitivity when choosing between delayed, effortful, and delayed and effortful rewards.
ISSN:1937-321X
2151-318X
DOI:10.1037/a0025772