, 2005; Barbano et al., 2009). Moreover, though dopaminergic manipulations can affect behavioral outcomes in animals trained on learning tasks, there is not strong evidence that accumbens DA is critical for the specific aspect of instrumental learning that involves the association between Enzalutamide order the instrumental action and the reinforcing outcome (Yin et al., 2008). Nevertheless, accumbens

DA clearly is important for aspects of appetitive as well as aversive motivation (Salamone et al., 2007; Cabib and Puglisi-Allegra, 2012) and participates in learning processes, at least in part through processes that involve Pavlovian approach and Pavlovian to instrumental transfer (Yin et al., 2008; Belin et al., 2009). Interference with accumbens DA transmission

blunts the acquisition of Pavlovian approach responses that are instigated by cues that predict food delivery and impairs avoidance responses elicited by cues that predict aversive stimuli. Accumbens DA depletions or antagonism reduce the activating effects of conditioned stimuli and make animals very sensitive to work-related instrumental response costs (e.g., output of ratio schedules with large ratio requirements, Selleck VE 821 barrier climbing; Salamone et al., 2007, 2012; Barbano et al., 2009). Thus, nucleus accumbens DA is clearly involved in the aspects of motivation, and the regulation of goal-directed actions, but in a rather specific and complex way that is not conveyed by the simple word “reward.” Some instrumental tasks tap into the functions subserved by mesolimbic DA (e.g., activational aspects of motivation, exertion of effort), and thus impairment of mesolimbic DA readily affects performance on these tasks, while responding on other positively reinforced tasks, or measures of primary food motivation, are left intact. In the last few years, the picture that has emerged too is that neostriatum (i.e., dorsal striatum) and its DA innervation

appears to have a clearer link to the processing of instrumental associations than does the nucleus accumbens (Yin et al., 2008). Lesions of the dorsomedial neostriatum made animals insensitive to both reinforcer devaluation and contingency degradation (Yin et al., 2005). Both cell body lesions and DA depletions in dorsolateral striatum have been shown to impair habit formation (Yin et al., 2004; Faure et al., 2005). The involvement of neostriatum in habit formation could be related to the hypothesized role of the basal ganglia in promoting the development of action sequences or “chunking” of components of instrumental behavior (Graybiel, 1998; Matsumoto et al., 1999). The idea that there is a transition from ventral striatal regulation of instrumental responding to neostriatal mechanisms that regulate habit formation has been employed extensively to provide an explanation of several features of drug addiction (see review by Belin et al.