Interoceptive sensations elicited by drugs of abuse can form associations with surrounding stimuli in a manner similar to externally perceived (i.e., exteroceptive) cues. A wide range of interoceptive stimuli have been established to guide behaviour in male rats. Here we extend that research to an opioid agonist stimulus, in both males and females. We predicted that when paired with an appetitive outcome, morphine could imbue that drug state with increasing appetitive value. Male and female rats were assigned to a feature positive (FP) or feature negative (FN) group and received daily intermixed morphine or saline sessions. For FP rats, on morphine sessions, each white noise (WN) presentation was followed by access to sucrose; on saline sessions, WN was still presented, but sucrose was withheld. FN rats learned the reverse contingency. After conditioning, rats learned to lever-press for intravenous access to morphine to assess motivation for the interoceptive stimulus. Indeed, morphine can resolve the ambiguity of reward-predictive cues in male and female rats. In males, an appetitive learning history with morphine imbued the interoceptive stimulus with conditioned reinforcing properties such that FP males showed greater morphine self-administration compared to FN counterparts. In contrast, there were no differences in morphine self-administration between FP and FN-assigned female rats. These data indicate that the valence of a learning history with an internally-perceived stimulus can alter its subsequent reinforcement value in a sex-dependent manner.

Investigating the conditioned enhancing properties of a morphine interceptive discriminative stimulus in male and female rats

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PS-3-F -  Cognition and Behavior

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Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

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Investigating the conditioned enhancing properties of a morphine interceptive discriminative stimulus in male and female rats

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