Animal Models of Drug Abuse: Place and Taste Conditioning

Preclinical animal research has contributed greatly to our understanding of numerous human disease states and will continue to provide a method for investigating the various biochemical events, physiological processes, and behavioral implications of various diseases. For substance abuse and dependence, this research has enabled scientists to gain a greater understanding of the neurochemical events involved in the brain's response to drugs, both licit and illicit, and to provide a means by which to design and test novel pharmaco-therapeutic interventions. To enable these discoveries, scientists have developed numerous animal models that attempt to replicate human drug addiction. The current review explores two popular Pavlovian conditioning procedures, conditioned place preference and conditioned taste aversion, which are used to investigate the rewarding and aversive effects (respectively) of drugs of abuse. For each procedure, a brief history of the field is followed by the advantages of the procedures and a step-by-step explanation of each procedure's conditioning protocol.