The striatum of the mammalian forebrain can be divided into 2 compartments, the patches and the matrix. We have investigated embryonic events involved in the formation of these compartments in rats. Early in development, dopamine fibers from the substantia nigra selectively innervate the patches. In the perinatal striatum, we observed a close match between the distributions of striatal cell bod...

Central thalamic deep brain stimulation (CT-DBS) has been proposed as an experimental therapeutic approach to produce consistent sustained regulation of forebrain arousal for several neurological diseases. We investigated local field potentials (LFPs) induced by CT-DBS from the thalamic central lateral nuclei (CL) and the striatum as potential biomarkers for the enhancement of lever-pressing sk...

In this review, we examine the functions of the striatum and the evidence that this brain region may be compromised in antisocial individuals. The striatum is involved in the processing of reward-related information and is thus important in reward-based learning. We review evidence from a growing number of brain imaging studies that have identified differences in the structure or functioning of...

Previous work in anuran amphibians has shown that activity in the caudal ventral striatum correlates with visuomotor activity: orienting responses toward prey fail to occur after striatal lesions. Thus it has been suggested that the striatum influences visually guided behavior. Therefore, the present study investigates visual response properties from neurons recorded in the striatum. Extracellu...

Infections with Corynebacterium striatum have been described in the literature over the last 2 decades, with the majority being bacteremia, central line infections, and occasionally, endocarditis. In recent years, the frequency of C. striatum infections appears to be increasing; a factor likely contributing to this is the increased ease and accuracy of the identification of Corynebacterium spp....

While dopamine input to the dorsal striatum is well-known to be critical for action selection, including alcohol-motivated behaviors, it is unknown whether changes in phasic dopamine accompany these behaviors. Long-term alcohol abuse is believed to promote alterations in the neurocircuitry of reward learning in both ventral and dorsal striatum, potentially through increasing dopamine release. U...

Striatal targets related to the dorsal thalamus were studied in reptiles. The lateral striatum projects to globus pallidus and to three cellular groups associated to the lateral forebrain bundle: the anterior entopeduncular nucleus, the suprapeduncular nucleus, and the ventromedial thalamic nucleus. The projection is heavier on the suprapeduncular nucleus, which in turn projects on nucleus rotu...

Successful foragers respond flexibly to environmental stimuli. Behavioral flexibility depends on a number of brain areas that send convergent projections to the medial striatum, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, and amygdala. Here, we tested the hypothesis that neurons in the medial striatum are involved in flexible action selection, by representing changes in stimul...

We explored the circumstances in which rats engage either declarative memory (and the hippocampus) or habit memory (and the dorsal striatum). Rats with damage to the hippocampus or dorsal striatum were given three different two-choice discrimination tasks (odor, object, and pattern). These tasks differed in the number of trials required for learning (approximately 10, 60, and 220 trials). Dorsa...

Combining rabies-virus tracing, optical clearing (CLARITY), and whole-brain light-sheet imaging, we mapped the monosynaptic inputs to midbrain dopamine neurons projecting to different targets (different parts of the striatum, cortex, amygdala, etc.) in mice. We found that most populations of dopamine neurons receive a similar set of inputs rather than forming strong reciprocal connections with ...