PSYC 4035 Midterm: Exam 3
Document Summary
Reward circuit: registers pleasure motivates the individual to repeat the behavior (but brain has to remember what the behavior was) means that reward circuit interacts with structures that mediate emotion (amygdala) and memory (hippocampus). Dopamine is a salience indicator tells us what to focus on and then helps us to remember later (cheeseburger vs. lion example: with repeated drug use, natural reinforcers release less dopamine while drugs don"t release less as drug use becomes chronic, the behavior changes from voluntary to automatic until use is compulsive, at that point, the prefrontal cortex is less active (it chills out as if it has been hijacked) and doesn"t recover well (relapse). Less responsive to normal rewards and overactive in response to drugs or stimuli that predict drugs as a result of the strong stimulus drug associations create powerful craving sensations in the frontal cortex, which is transmitted through nerves that feed back onto the reward pathway.
