Review
The runway model of drug self-administration

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Abstract

Behavioral scientists have employed operant runways as a means of investigating the motivational impact of incentive stimuli for the better part of the past 100 years. In this task, the speed with which a trained animal traverses a long straight alley for positive incentive stimuli, like food or water, provides a reliable index of the subject's motivation to seek those stimuli. The runway is therefore a particularly appropriate tool for investigating the drug-seeking behavior of animals working for drugs of abuse. The current review describes our laboratory's work over the past twenty years developing and implementing an operant runway model of drug self-administration. Procedures are described that methodologically dissociate the antecedent motivational processes that induce an animal to seek a drug, from the positive reinforcing consequences of actually earning the drug. Additional work is reviewed on the use of the runway method as a means of modeling the factors that often result in a “relapse” of drug self-administration after a period of abstinence (i.e., a response reinstatement test), as are runway studies that revealed the presence of opposing positive and negative consequences of self-administered cocaine. This body of work suggests that the runway method has served as a powerful behavioral tool for the study of the behavioral and neurobiological basis of drug self-administration.

Section snippets

The runway drug self-administration model

Animal learning researchers have been using operant runways as a tool for the study of goal-seeking motivated behavior for the better part of a century (e.g., see early classic studies by Crespi, 1942, Hull, 1934, Miller, 1944). In such studies, the time required for the subject to traverse the alley (i.e., Run Time) has proven to be a reliable index of the animal's motivation to seek the incentive that is made available upon goal box entry. Put simply, changes in the subject's motivation to

Dissociating the motivational and reinforcing actions of drugs of abuse

Much of our work on the neurobiology of drug-seeking motivation and/or reinforcement has involved investigations of the impact of the D2-family dopamine receptor antagonist, haloperidol, on the runway behavior of rats working for iv diacetylmorphine (heroin) (e.g., Ettenberg and McFarland, 2003, McFarland and Ettenberg, 1995, McFarland and Ettenberg, 1998a). Each of these studies employed external cues associated with drug delivery to experimentally “activate” or arouse the subjects' motivation

Runway response reinstatement test

Another means of studying the motivational impact of drug reinforcers is to assess their ability, or the ability of environmental cues associated with the drugs, to reinstate responding in animals whose operant behavior has been weakened by reinforcer removal (i.e., extinction trials). There have been numerous animal studies employing response-reinstatement tests as a means of modeling the “relapse” back to drug-taking behavior that human addicts often exhibit after a period of abstinence (see

The opponent-process properties of self-administered cocaine

An early and unexpected finding of our research program was the unique behavioral profile of animals running the alley for IV cocaine. In previous studies using natural and drug reinforcers, the subjects run the alley faster as trials progressed. In contrast, while cocaine-reinforced animals exhibited “normal” start latencies, they took progressively longer to actually reach the goal box over trials/days. Data from the infrared emitter–detector pairs lining the base of the runway, revealed that

Summary and conclusions

The runway self-administration test represents a hybrid model of drug-motivated behavior that incorporates the key procedural aspects of both the conditioned place preference and lever-press self-administration tests. As with the CPP method, animals are tested undrugged for their approach to a distinct location associated with prior drug administration (in this case the goal box); and like the traditional self-administration test, the animals must emit an operant response (in this case running

Acknowledgments

The development and implementation of the runway model of drug self-administration described in this paper would not have been possible without the dedication, motivation and considerable talents of the many students and technicians that have worked in the UCSB Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory over the past two decades. Particular thanks to the co-authors of the many papers cited throughout this review including Rick Bernardi, the late Carter Camp, Ami Cohen, Dr. Cristine Czachoswki, Dr.

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