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The ventral striatum (VS) and amygdala are two structures often implicated as essential structures for learning. The literature addressing the contribution of these areas to learning, however, is not entirely consistent. We propose that these inconsistencies are due to learning environments and the effect they have on motivation. To differentiate aspects of learning from environmental factors that affect motivation, we ran a series of experiments with varying task factors. We compared monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with VS lesions, amygdala lesions, and unoperated controls on reinforcement learning (RL) tasks that involve learning from both gains and losses as well as from deterministic and stochastic schedules of reinforcement. We found that for all three groups, performance varied by experiment. All three groups modulated their behavior in the same directions, to varying degrees, across the three experiments. This …