Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem:
how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move? It is …

The striatum is essential for learning which actions lead to reward and for implementing
those actions. Decades of experimental and theoretical work have led to several influential …

Spontaneous animal behaviour is built from action modules that are concatenated by the
brain into sequences,. However, the neural mechanisms that guide the composition of …

Learning to predict rewards based on environmental cues is essential for survival. It is
believed that animals learn to predict rewards by updating predictions whenever the …

The dopamine projection from ventral tegmental area (VTA) to nucleus accumbens (NAc) is
critical for motivation to work for rewards and reward-driven learning. How dopamine …

Social behaviors are among the most important motivated behaviors. How dopamine (DA),
a" reward" signal, releases during social behaviors has been a topic of interest for decades …

There is increased appreciation that dopamine neurons in the midbrain respond not only to
reward and reward-predicting cues,, but also to other variables such as the distance to …

Drug consumption is driven by a drug's pharmacological effects, which are experienced as
rewarding, and is influenced by genetic, developmental, and psychosocial factors that …

Behaviours such as eating, copulating, defending oneself or taking addictive drugs begin
with a motivation to initiate the behaviour. Both this motivational drive and the behaviours …

Addiction is commonly identified with habitual nonmedical self-administration of drugs. It is
usually defined by characteristics of intoxication or by characteristics of withdrawal …