The dorsal striatum is critically involved in a variety of motor behaviours, including regulation of motor activity, motor skill learning and motor response to psychostimulant and neuroleptic drugs, but contribution of D(2)R-striatopallidal and D(1)R-striatonigral neurons in the dorsomedial (DMS, associative) and dorsolateral (DLS, sensorimotor) striatum to distinct functions remains elusive. T...

The basal ganglia, in particular the striatum, are central to theories of behavioral control, and often identified as a seat of action selection. Reinforcement learning (RL) models--which have driven much recent experimental work on this region--cast striatum as a dynamic controller, integrating sensory and motivational information to construct efficient and enriching behavioral policies. Befit...

The effects of microinjections of cholinergic agents into the substantia nigra pars compacta on dopamine (DA) efflux in the anterior dorsomedial striatum of urethane-anesthetized rats were investigated using in vivo chronoamperometry and intracerebral microdialysis techniques. A dose-dependent augmentation of DA efflux as evidenced by increases in the chronoamperometric signals was observed in ...

Because humans and animals encounter various situations, the ability to adaptively decide upon responses to any situation is essential. To date, however, decision processes and the underlying neural substrates have been investigated under specific conditions; thus, little is known about how various conditions influence one another in these processes. In this study, we designed a binary choice t...

Contingency theories of goal-directed action propose that experienced disjunctions between an action and its specific consequences, as well as conjunctions between these events, contribute to encoding the action-outcome association. Although considerable behavioral research in rats and humans has provided evidence for this proposal, relatively little is known about the neural processes that con...

A common source of variance (i.e., "general intelligence") underlies an individual's performance across diverse tests of cognitive ability, and evidence indicates that the processing efficacy of working memory may serve as one such source of common variance. One component of working memory, selective attention, has been reported to co-vary with general intelligence, and dopamine D1 signaling in...