Does positive feeling lead to more impulsiveness? – Implication of previous rewarded experience on location-dependent motoric impulsivity

Abstract

Positive feeling or rewarding experience is crucial for individuals to operative their cognitive activities via an outcome evaluation of incentive reinforcement. For a long time, rewarding process or outcome evaluation is assumed greatly influenced by neuronal construct that holds individuals’ impulsiveness, a capacity to inhibit unwanted behaviors provoked in a given situation. In the present study, we proposed that the outcome evaluation or rewarding experience can influence the occurrence of impulsiveness too. We hypothesized that animals would be more likely to deliver impulsive action in the place where it was previously associated with reinforcing process, in which central dopamine may play an important role. By employing five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT), we examined whether one of the five holes where rats made a correct response to get the reward would gain a higher probability to deliver premature or perseverative activities than other holes in the next trial of 5-CSRTT under baseline or longer waiting period condition. The effects of D1 receptor antagonist SCH23390 were also evaluated in the above paradigm. We demonstrated that (i) the influence on motoric impulsive response from previous rewarded experience can be described in a behavioral paradigm such as the 5-CSRTT, (ii) both prematures and perseverations at the hole associated with previous rewarding were about one-fifth of probability, however were statistically not correlated unless the interventions of inter-trial interval = 7 plus SCH23390, and (iii) the hole associated with the positive reinforcement of the 5-CSRTT appears more likely for rats to carry out an intuitive impetus under SCH23390 in a longer waiting condition. Our results may shed some insight toward the role of rewarding process in impulsive behavior.