doi: 10.53962/jcc3-qsaa
Originally published on 2023-08-10 under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication
To maximize survival, animals should switch between motivated behaviours, like drinking, feeding or social interaction, in accordance with environmental availability, internal needs, and species-typical ethological needs. Drives are the neural mechanisms giving rise to motivated behaviours, and should involve a switching mechanism producing motivational transitions which enhance survival and fitness. Lack of drive switching can lead to inflexible, repetitive behaviours, which are a hallmark of many psychiatric disorders, like obsessive compulsive disorder. In order to study drive switching, it would be helpful to directly measure motivational switching in genetically tractable rodent model systems. Here, a potentially useful motivational switching metric for rodent work is described and contrasted to similar concepts in the literature. It is proposed that this ethologically-grounded parameter could be a phenotypic unit relevant to behavioural compulsions in humans.