Chronic stress causes frontostriatal reorganization and affects decision-making.

Full Abstract

The ability to shift between different behavioral strategies is necessary for appropriate decision-making. Here, we show that chronic stress biases decision-making strategies, affecting the ability of stressed animals to perform actions on the basis of their consequences. Using two different operant tasks, we revealed that, in making choices, rats subjected to chronic stress became insensitive to changes in outcome value and resistant to changes in action-outcome contingency. Furthermore, chronic stress caused opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying these different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum. These data suggest that the relative advantage of circuits coursing through sensorimotor striatum observed after chronic stress leads to a bias in behavioral strategies toward habit.

Author information

Author/s: Dias-Ferreira, Eduardo (E); Sousa, João C (JC); Melo, Irene (I); Morgado, Pedro (P); Mesquita, Ana R (AR); Cerqueira, João J (JJ); Costa, Rui M (RM); Sousa, Nuno (N);

Affiliation: Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Health Sciences, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Science (New York, N.Y.) (Science), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Jul; vol 325 (issue 5940) : pp 621-5

Dates: Created 2009/07/31; Completed 2009/08/11;

PMID: 19644122, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 8/21/2009, IMS Date: )

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