Dynamic Computation of Incentive Salience: “Wanting” What Was Never “Liked”
Open accessAbstract
Pavlovian cues for rewards become endowed with incentive salience, guiding “wanting” to their learned reward. Usually, cues are “wanted” only if their rewards have ever been “liked,” but here we show that mesocorticolimbic systems can recompute “wanting”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 “disliked” taste of intense salt, although they do fire to a cue that predicts the taste of previously “liked” 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 “liked” (salt taste had always been “disliked” 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 “wanting” 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.
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The attribution of incentive salience is the product of previous experience (i.e., learned associations) interacting with an individual's genetic propensity and neurobiological state.
“The attribution of incentive salience is the product of previous experience (i.e., learned associations) interacting with an individual’s genetic propensity and neurobiological state 16,24–27.”
From A selective role for dopamine in stimulus-reward learning (2011) · cites this paper as [26]
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- Authors
- Tindell, A. J., Smith, K. S., Berridge, K. C., & Aldridge, J. W.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- McGovern Institute for Brain Research (US)
- Venue
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2009-09-30
- Volume
- 29
- Issue
- 39
- Pages
- 12220-12228
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC2792765
- OpenAlex
- W2053155615
- Cited by
- 124
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 4.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- National Institutes of Health (DA015188, DC00011)
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH-63649, R01MH063649)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA017752, DA-017752, DA015188, R01DA015188)
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC-00011, T32DC000011)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Keywords
- incentive salience, wanting, classical conditioning, mesocorticolimbic system, ventral pallidum, salty taste, salt depletion, appetite, hedonic value, neuronal firing, taste aversion
- MeSH terms
- Action Potentials, Animals, Conditioning, Classical, Cues, Learning, Male, Motivation, Nerve Net, Reward, Rats, Sprague-Dawley, Computational Biology, Rats
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