Stress-Induced Shifts from Goal-Directed to Habitual Control: A Review of Prefrontal-Striatal Microcircuits

Stressed individuals commonly experience a dramatic shift in their decision-making from goal-directed to automated under both acute and chronic stress. Although behavioral psychology referred to such changes as switching "to autopilot mode" in the past, cognitive neuroscience identifies it as a functional reallocation of executive control between two different neural networks: one responsible for the goal-directed behavior and another for the automation of processes in question. The former includes the prefrontal cortex and dorsomedial striatum, and the latter involves the sensorimotor cortex and dorsolateral striatum. This paper presents a brief review of the recent research at the cellular, network, and behavioral levels of analysis on the mechanism by which stress neurobiology leads to such a shift. The stress hormones, glucocorticoids and catecholamines, overwhelm the prefrontal cortex by saturating the receptors and weakening synapses but leaving subcortical circuits intact.