05). Most notably, firing just after the “go” signal (tone offset) was not different on short- and long-latency trials (Figure 6D, third column), in marked contrast to the strong unidirectional relationship between movement initiation latency and postcue firing in the DS task (Figures 3, 4, and 5). There was significantly greater firing in trials with fast compared to slow movement speeds (latency between nose poke exit and reward receptacle

entry), but only within the epoch that followed cue offset (Figure 6E). Thus, the weakly excited neurons in the CD task did not encode movement initiation latency but did encode response speed. To confirm this result and to assess latency and speed encoding in other neurons, we repeated the same analyses shown in Figure 6 on four different nonexclusive groups of neurons: all neurons not analyzed in Figure 6 (nonexcited neurons), the 25% of neurons with the largest firing rate decrease selleck screening library selleckchem in each epoch (inhibited neurons, n = 38), the 25% of neurons with the largest firing rate increase in each epoch (without regard to significance, n = 38), and all 155 neurons pooled together. There was no difference in firing between short- and long-latency trials, or between fast and slow movement speed trials,

at any epoch in any of these groups of neurons (Wilcoxon p > 0.08; not shown). Finally, we asked whether NAc neurons encoded the direction of the upcoming response—contraversive or ipsiversive—and found on average no significant encoding among the excited cells in the four epochs (Wilcoxon p ≥ 0.1). This result is consistent with the previously published findings in this data set, which show ∼6% of neurons significantly encode upcoming response direction, but with no overall bias for contraversive or ipsiversive movement (Taha et al., 2007). In summary, the encoding of approach vigor was much weaker, and occurred in fewer neurons in the inflexible approach CD task than in the flexible approach DS task. In the DS task, the DS-evoked firing was greater nearly when the animal was closer to the operant lever at cue onset (Figures 3, 4, and 5). This apparent proximity signal is intriguing given prior observations

that NAc neurons encode spatial location through “place field”-like activity (e.g., Lavoie and Mizumori, 1994). While it was not possible to assess place-field-like properties of DS-evoked firing because of its brief duration, we were able to assess place-field-like activity of spontaneous firing recorded in the absence of cues during the ITI. Of 126 NAc neurons, 31 exhibited place-field-like activity during the ITI, which we defined as having four or more adjacent points (2 × 2 cm squares) where the firing rate was greater than twice the mean (Figure S6). Consistent with previous findings in the NAc (German and Fields, 2007; Tabuchi et al., 2000; van der Meer and Redish, 2009), the preferred locations were biased toward task-relevant locations (near the reward receptacle and levers).