@article{ref1,
title="Dynamic computation of incentive salience: "wanting" what was never "liked"",
journal="Journal of neuroscience",
year="2009",
author="Tindell, Amy J. and Smith, Karen S. and Berridge, Kent C. and Aldridge, J. Wayne",
volume="29",
number="39",
pages="12220-12228",
abstract="Pavlovian cues for rewards become endowed with incentive salience, guiding &quot;wanting&quot; to their learned reward. Usually, cues are &quot;wanted&quot; only if their rewards have ever been &quot;liked,&quot; but here we show that mesocorticolimbic systems can recompute &quot;wanting&quot; de novo by integrating novel physiological signals with a cue's preexisting associations to an outcome that lacked hedonic value. That is, a cue's incentive salience can be recomputed adaptively. We demonstrate that this recomputation is encoded in neural signals coursing through the ventral pallidum. Ventral pallidum neurons do not ordinarily fire vigorously to a cue that predicts the previously &quot;disliked&quot; taste of intense salt, although they do fire to a cue that predicts the taste of previously &quot;liked&quot; sucrose. Yet we show that neural firing rises dramatically to the salt cue immediately and selectively when that cue is encountered in a never-before-experienced state of physiological salt depletion. Crucially, robust neural firing to the salt cue occurred the first time it was encountered in the new depletion state (in cue-only extinction trials), even before its associated intense saltiness has ever been tasted as positively &quot;liked&quot; (salt taste had always been &quot;disliked&quot; before). The amplification of incentive salience did not require additional learning about the cue or the newly positive salt taste. Thus dynamic recomputation of cue-triggered &quot;wanting&quot; signals can occur in real time at the moment of cue re-encounter by combining previously learned Pavlovian associations with novel physiological information about a current state of specific appetite.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0270-6474",
doi="10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2499-09.2009",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2499-09.2009"
}