Equipment for assessing the effects of chronic dopamine receptor blockade on reward

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The requested equipment is central to a research programme that represents an important step in understanding how the brain's dopamine (DA) system guides behaviour towards rewards. Activation of the DA system mediates the pursuit of rewards necessary for survival, including food, water and sexual partners. Conditions that lead to a supersensitive DA system can lead to the excessive pursuit of rewarding stimuli, as seen in drug addiction, eating disorders and pathological gambling. The most widely-used model to induce DA supersensitivity in the laboratory involves the repeated stimulation of the DA system with DA agonists (e.g., amphetamine). This model has led to important advances in our understanding of how the DA system mediates the response to rewards. However, chronic suppression of the DA system with compounds that block DA D2/3 receptors can also induce a DA supersensitive state. This alternate and relatively unstudied model of DA supersensitivity is an opportunity to gain new insights into how the brain's DA system processes rewards and guides our behaviour accordingly. The goal of my research, therefore, is to determine how DA supersensitivity induced by chronic administration of a DA D2/3 receptor antagonist to laboratory rats influences the pursuit of drug and non-drug rewards. This work is important because it will provide new insights into how the DA system processes rewards under normal and abnormal conditions, and this knowledge could be used to develop new treatments for conditions where DA activity is excessive and reward function is altered.