Tyrosine Hydroxylase–Positive Nucleus Accumbens Neurons Influence Delay Discounting in a Mouse T-Maze Task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Delay discounting (DD) is a phenomenon where individuals devalue a reward associated with a temporal delay, with the rate of devaluation being representative of impulsive-like behavior. Here, we first sought to develop and validate a mouse DD task to study brain circuits involved in DD decision-making within short developmental time windows, given widespread evidence of developmental regulation of impulse control and risk-taking. We optimized a T-maze DD task for mice that enables training and DD trials within 2 weeks. Mice learned to choose between a large and a small reward located at opposite arms of a T-maze. Once training criteria were met, mice underwent DD whereby the large reward choice was associated with a temporal delay. Task validation showed that adolescent C57BL/6J mice display an increased preference for the small reward upon a temporal delay, confirming increased impulsivity compared with adults. We next used this DD task to explore the neural basis of decision-making. We used tyrosine hydroxylase transgenic mice (TH-Cre) to target TH-positive neurons in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) with Cre-dependent excitatory or inhibitory designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADDs). Inhibition of transduced neurons in the NAc decreased preference for the small but immediate reward during DD. Inhibition of TH-positive neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) did not affect impulsive choice in this DD task. These results uncover a novel role for NAc TH-positive neurons in DD behavior and expand the repertoire of behavioral tasks available for studying decision-making across the lifespan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".