Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biol Psychiatry. 2015 May 7;79(11):878–886. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.04.026

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Age related differences in VTA population responses during learning, maintenance and extinction. Each panel depicts the normalized and smoothed neuronal responses of all VTA neurons in both age groups, averaged across trials and neurons. Adolescent VTA neurons had smaller reward delivery evoked neuronal responses than adults during sessions 3–6. Adolescents demonstrated a greater action evoked response than adults. Finally, during extinction (session 8), adolescents showed increased cue evoked activity compared to adults. Data are aligned to the onset time of the cue (left column), time of the instrumental action (middle column), and the time of reward delivery. Data are depicted as mean ± SE. The cumulative number of dopamine-like units recorded in each session is depicted in the upper left corner of the left column of each row. The topmost number indicates adolescent units. Tan overlay indicates maintenance sessions and blue overlay indicates extinction sessions.