title: Altered basolateral amygdala encoding in an animal model of schizophrenia.
abstract: It has been proposed that schizophrenia results, in part, from the inappropriate or spurious attribution of salience to cues in the environment. We have recently reported neural correlates of salience in the basolateral amygdala (ABL) of rats during learning in an odor-guided discrimination task. Here we tested whether this dopamine-dependent salience signal is altered in rats with neonatal ventral hippocampal lesions (NVHLs), a rodent model of schizophrenia. We found that ABL signals related to violations in reward prediction were only mildly affected by NVHL; however, neurons in rats with NVHLs showed significantly stronger selectivity during odor sampling, particularly for the more salient large-reward cue. The elevated cue-evoked activity in NVHL rats was correlated with heightened orienting behavior and also with changes in firing to the shifts in reward, suggesting that it reflected abnormal signaling of the large reward-predicting cue's salience. These results are broadly consistent with the proposal that schizophrenics suffer from enhanced signaling of salience.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21201.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2267-4781
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hernandez
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
authors.forename: Amanda C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Burton
authors.affiliation: Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21201.
authors.forename: Patricio
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: O'Donnell
authors.affiliation: NIDA-IRP, Baltimore, Maryland 21224, Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21287, and Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21201.
authors.forename: Geoffrey
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Schoenbaum
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, mroesch@umd.edu.
authors.forename: Matthew R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Roesch
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D000831:Animals, Newborn; D066272:Basolateral Nuclear Complex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003463:Cues; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D055696:Olfactory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D051381:Rats; D012201:Reward; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology
keywords: amygdala; behavior; electrophysiology; rat; salience; schizophrenia