Palatability attributed to alcohol and alcohol-paired flavors.

The orosensory features of alcoholic drinks are potent relapse triggers because they acquire incentive properties during consumption, including enhanced palatability. Whether mice similarly perceive alcoholic drinks to be more palatable after repeated consumption is complicated by reports showing that alcohol elicits aversive taste reactivity responses and conditions flavor avoidance. Here, by analyzing the microstructure of alcohol consumption, we report a gradual increase in lick bout duration relative to water that is partially maintained by an alcohol-paired flavor in extinction.

Augmenting glutamatergic, but not dopaminergic, activity in the nucleus accumbens shell disrupts responding to a discrete alcohol cue in an alcohol context.

Discrete alcohol cues and contexts are relapse triggers for people with alcohol use disorder exerting particularly powerful control over behaviour when they co-occur. Here, we investigated the neural substrates subserving the capacity for alcohol-associated contexts to elevate responding to an alcohol-predictive conditioned stimulus (CS). Specifically, rats were trained in a distinct 'alcohol context' to respond by entering a fluid port during a discrete auditory CS that predicted the delivery of alcohol and were familiarized with a 'neutral context' wherein alcohol was never available.

Learning processes in relapse to alcohol use: lessons from animal models.

Rationale: Alcohol use is reliably preceded by discrete and contextual stimuli which, through diverse learning processes, acquire the capacity to promote alcohol use and relapse to alcohol use.

Objective: We review contemporary extinction, renewal, reinstatement, occasion setting, and sex differences research within a conditioning framework of relapse to alcohol use to inform the development of behavioural and pharmacological therapies.

Key Findings: Diverse learning processes and corresponding neurobiological substrates contribute to relapse to alcohol use.

Supplementary dataset of context-dependent conditioned responding to an alcohol-predictive cue in female and male rats.

This supplementary dataset is supportive of the research article entitled 'The role of context on responding to an alcohol-predictive cue in female and male rats' [1]. This article describes the raw data pertaining to the behaviour of male and female rats during intermittent to ethanol and Pavlovian conditioning training and testing procedures. Specifically, the dataset describes the alcohol consumption and ingested-dose of ethanol during home-cage ethanol exposure, as well as the conditioned responding during Pavlovian discrimination training, a test assessing the effect of context on responding to an alcohol-predict cue in the absence of alcohol, and a reinstatement test assessing the effect of context on conditioned responding to an extinguished alcohol-predictive cue.