A neuropsychological basis for temptation-resistant voluntary exercise

Abstract

Despite well-known health benefits of physical activity, many people under-exercise, and what drives prioritization of exercise over other alternatives is unclear. We implement a novel paradigm allowing to study how freely behaving mice rapidly display such prioritizing between time spent on wheel-running and other temptations such as palatable food. Causal manipulations and correlative analyses of underlying appetitive and consummatory psychobehavioral processes revealed this prioritizing to be instantiated by hypothalamic hypocretin/orexin neurons.