Neuron Article The Rostromedial Tegmental Nucleus (RMTg), a GABAergic Afferent to Midbrain Dopamine Neurons, Encodes Aversive Stimuli and Inhibits Motor Responses Thomas C. Jhou,1,* Howard L. Fields,2 Mark G. Baxter,3 Clifford B. Saper,4 and Peter C. Holland5 1Behavioral Neuroscience Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA 2Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, University of California at San Francisco, Emeryville, CA 94608, USA 3Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, OX1 3UD Oxford, UK 4Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02215, USA 5Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA *Correspondence:
[email protected] DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.02.001 SUMMARY vation strongly inhibits dopamine (DA) neurons (Christoph et al., 1986; Ji and Shepard, 2007), are activated by aversive Separate studies have implicated the lateral habe- stimuli and reward omission and inhibited by reward-predictive nula (LHb) or amygdala-related regions in processing cues or unexpected rewards (Matsumoto and Hikosaka, 2007, aversive stimuli, but their relationships to each other 2009; Geisler and Trimble, 2008). These ‘‘negative reward and to appetitive motivational systems are poorly prediction errors’’ are inverse to firing patterns in putative dopa- understood. We show that neurons in the recently minergic midbrain neurons (Mirenowicz and Schultz, 1994, 1996; identified GABAergic rostromedial tegmental Hollerman and Schultz, 1998;