The silence of the rewards: Non-reward cue suppresses cue-driven behaviour in pavlovian-instrumental transfer

Abstract Flexible reward-seeking relies upon an organism’s integration of expectations about environmental cues with knowledge of actions that produce rewards, which is captured by pavlovian instrumental transfer (PIT). Although widely used to study motivation across species, rodent PIT paradigms differ from human tasks in lacking an active baseline for comparison. Here we adapted the full PIT paradigm to include a non-rewarded cue (CSØ) as an active control with the aim of improving the translational relevance of the procedure. Despite robust pavlovian and instrumental learning, neither male nor female rats expressed outcome-specific PIT when the active baseline was present. The absence of PIT persisted even after instrumental extinction training prior to the test, though cue-driven magazine approaches remained elevated. Data obtained under these conditions may reflect protocol-dependent modulation by the amount of training, or strain-specific differences in motivational influence. Replicated across male and female cohorts, they identify boundary conditions where PIT appears less robust. This methodological adaptation advances the translational alignment between animal and human PIT paradigms and informs future investigations into the mechanisms of cue-motivated behaviour.