Rapid appetitive transitions are sculpted by amygdala to accumbens pathways

Foraging, pursuit, and predation rapidly transition into behavioral quiescence during reward capture and consumption. While appetitive-consummatory dissociations are embedded at both psychological and neural levels, the mechanisms controlling switches or transitions between appetitive seeking and consummatory behaviors remain poorly understood. Here we identify the BLA[->]AcbSh pathway as critical to these transitions by showing that this pathway inhibits the appetitive seeking response in the presence of consummatory demands. Using an appetitive cue-discrimination task in male rats, we show that reward delivery is a significant driver of seeking inhibition and that a BLA[->]AcbSh pathway mediates this inhibition. This role in suppressing seeking responses during periods of consumption was not due to a general suppression of behavior because responding to other cues during the same test was unaffected. Moreover, it was specific to the BLA[->]AcbSh pathway, because the contribution of the BLA[->]AcbC pathway to appetitive switching was distinct and modest. State-dependent silencing of BLA[->]AcbSh revealed that the modulation of seeking before and after reward delivery are co-dependent. Finally, we found that BLA terminals in AcbSh have functional connectivity to LH-projecting AcbSh neurons, thereby identifying a BLA[->]AcbSh[->]LH pathway as a putative route for the rapid regulation of appetitive behaviors. Taken together, these findings suggest that the BLA[->]AcbSh pathway is a core component of an appetitive switching system, recruited under conditions requiring rapid or dynamic shifts in appetitive behavior, and that this pathway enables these shifts by actively inhibiting seeking. Significance statementForaging, pursuit, and predation quickly transition into behavioral quiescence during reward capture and consumption. These transitions are critical for flexible and responsive sequences of behavior. Here we show that behavioral transitions are actively controlled at the limbic-striatal interface. We identify reward receipt as a proximal trigger for transition between reward seeking and taking, we identify active inhibition as the functional operation of this transition, and we identify the basolateral amygdala[->]accumbens shell pathway as critical to this functional operation.