Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2021 Nov 4;11:21645. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-00976-2

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

Experimental design. (A) Cartoon illustrating the skilled reaching lever-press task and VNS procedures. Rats were required to press and release a lever situated 2 cm outside the training booth within a 2 s window to receive reward (B) Example rewarded (Hit, red) trial and unrewarded (Miss, gray) trials from a single pretreatment session. Rats were required to press the lever past the “hit threshold” (9.5 degrees below horizontal) and return it to less than 4.75 degrees from horizontal (“Release/Reward Threshold”) in under 2 s to receive food reward. Unrewarded “Miss Trials” were those in which rats either failed to reach the hit threshold (gray trace, left) or failed to release the lever within the required time window (gray trace, right). (C) Experimental design and timeline. Female Sprague–Dawley rats were trained on the lever press task (Acquisition) prior to implantation of VNS cuffs and intracortical cannula. After surgery, rats were trained until stable performance was reestablished (Recovery), and then dynamically allocated to a treatment group. During Treatment, rats received 10 training sessions in which yohimbine (yoh) or control vehicle was infused into M1 30 min prior to behavioral training, and in which VNS or sham stimulation was paired with correct lever-press performance; sham|veh (n = 7), VNS|veh (n = 6), sham|yoh (n = 6), VNS|yoh (n = 6). (D) VNS paired with the lever pressing task significantly enlarged the task-relevant proximal forelimb (PFL) area in M1. *p < 0.05, Student’s unpaired t-test.