Insight into differing decision-making strategies that underlie cognitively effort-based decision making using computational modeling in rats.

Rationale: The rat cognitive effort task (rCET), a rodent model of cognitive rather than physical effort, requires animals to choose between an easy or hard visuospatial discrimination, with a correct hard choice more highly rewarded. Like in humans, there is stable individual variation in choice behavior. In previous reports, animals were divided into two groups-workers and slackers-based on their mean preference for the harder option.

Win-Paired Cues Modulate the Effect of Dopamine Neuron Sensitization on Decision Making and Cocaine Self-administration: Divergent Effects Across Sex.

Background: Both psychostimulant use and engagement with probabilistic schedules of reward sensitize the mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) system. Such behaviors may act synergistically to explain the high comorbidity between stimulant use and gambling disorder. The salient audiovisual stimuli of modern electronic gambling may exacerbate the situation.