Effort-Based Food Choice Task

Effort-Based Food Choice (EBFC) is a highly translational behavioral assay used to assess motivation, effort allocation, reward valuation, and goal-directed behavior. In this task, animals choose between a high-value reward that requires effort to obtain and a lower-value reward that is freely available. The assay quantifies an individual’s willingness to work for reward and provides a sensitive measure of motivational impairments that are highly relevant to disorders characterized by amotivation, anhedonia, fatigue, and reduced goal-directed behavior, including depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, and other CNS disorders.

Importantly, EBFC has strong translational relevance to human effort-based decision-making paradigms that assess motivational deficits and reward processing. The task is particularly valuable for evaluating therapies targeting depression-related anhedonia, and other conditions associated with reduced motivation and effort expenditure. The assay demonstrates sensitivity to tetrabenazine, a vesicular monoamine transporter-2 (VMAT2) inhibitor that induces motivational deficits and effort-related impairments. Tetrabenazine shifts behavior away from high-effort/high-reward options toward freely available or low-effort alternatives, mirroring motivational impairments observed in clinical populations. This pharmacological sensitivity supports the assay’s translational validity for evaluating compounds designed to improve motivation, reward valuation, and effort-based decision-making.