Adolescent social isolation shifts the balance of decision-making strategy from goal-directed action to habitual response in adulthood via suppressing the excitatory neurotransmission onto the direct pathway of the dorsomedial striatum.
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| Abstract | :  Adverse experience, such as social isolation, during adolescence is one of the major causes of neuropsychiatric disorders that extend from adolescence into adulthood, such as substance addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and eating disorders leading to obesity. A common behavioral feature of these neuropsychiatric disorders is a shift in the balance of decision-making strategy from goal-directed action to habitual response. This study has verified that adolescent social isolation directly shifts the balance of decision-making strategy from goal-directed action to habitual response, and that it cannot be reversed by simple regrouping. This study has further revealed that adolescent social isolation induces a suppression in the excitatory neurotransmission onto the direct-pathway medium spiny neurons of the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), and that chemogenetically compensating this suppression effect shifts the balance of decision-making strategy from habitual response back to goal-directed action. These findings suggest that the plasticity in the DMS causes the shift in the balance of decision-making strategy, which would potentially help to develop a general therapy to treat the various neuropsychiatric disorders caused by adolescent social isolation. Such a study is especially necessary under the circumstances that social distancing and lockdown have caused during times of world-wide, society-wide pandemic. | 
| Year of Publication | :  2022 | 
| Journal | :  Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) | 
| Date Published | :  2022 | 
| ISSN Number | :  1047-3211 | 
| URL | :  https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhac158 | 
| DOI | :  10.1093/cercor/bhac158 | 
| Short Title | :  Cereb Cortex | 
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