Modelling compulsive actions in rats and mice: The back-translation of value-modulated attentional capture from humans to rodents

Value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) refers to the tendency for highly valued cues to capture attention even when counterproductive to an individual’s goals. VMAC is thought to measure incentive salience and has been shown to correlate with multiple measures of compulsivity. The current study demonstrates the first successful back-translation of VMAC to rodents. To achieve this, mice (Experiment 1) or rats (Experiment 2) were trained to sign-track to a high value lever signalling 3 pellets and a low value lever signalling 1 pellet, that would later serve as distractors. Rodents were next trained to nose-poke an illuminated port for a pellet, which would serve as the ‘target’ response. The key VMAC test phase compared nose-poke performance in the presence of high versus low value lever distractors. Rodents made significantly more omissions in the presence of the high than the low value lever distractor, despite losing 3 times as many pellets on these trials. This replicates findings from human VMAC tasks, in which participants are consistently impaired on high value relative to low value distractor trials despite greater reward loss. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect persisted despite devaluation of the pellet outcome by conditioned taste aversion, even when the disliked outcome was presented, suggesting a compulsion-like mechanism. Together, these data show that VMAC can be observed in both mice and rats, which opens new avenues for investigation of its behavioural and neural underpinnings, with implications for understanding and treating compulsive disorders.