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Olanzapine And Risperidone Disrupt Conditioned Avoidance Responding In Phencyclidine-Pretreated Or Amphetamine-Pretreated Rats By Selectively Weakening Motivational Salience Of Conditioned Stimulus, Ming Li, Wei He, Alexa Mead

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The rat conditioned avoidance response model is a well-established preclinical behavioral model predictive of antipsychotic efficacy. All clinically approved antipsychotic drugs disrupt conditioned avoidance responding – a feature that distinguishes them from other psychotherapeutics. We previously showed that the typical antipsychotic drug haloperidol disrupts avoidance responding by progressively attenuating the motivational salience of the conditioned stimulus (CS) in normal rats. In this study, using two pharmacological rat models of schizophrenia [e.g. phencyclidine (PCP) or amphetamine sensitization], we examined whether atypicals such as olanzapine or risperidone disrupt avoidance responding through the same behavioral mechanism. Rats were first pretreated with PCP, amphetamine, …