Appetitive determinants of self-stimulation.

Previous reports have pointed to a biologically meaningful relationship between brain-stimulated reward and appetitive motivation such as feeding. The present experiments further examined this relationship in chronically self-stimulating Sprague-Dawley rats. In Expt 1 restriction of ad libitum food produced a subsequent increase in self-stimulation in the substantia nigra. In Expt 2 restriction of ad libitum self-stimulation, from the same sites, produced a subsequent gain in body weight. In Expt 3 restriction of ad libitum self-stimulation produced subsequent increases in responding for stimulation.