The hippocampus and the striatum are thought to play distinct roles in learning and memory, each supporting an independent memory system. A fundamental question is whether, and how, these systems interact to jointly contribute to learning and memory. In particular, it remains unknown whether the striatum contributes selectively to implicit, habitual learning, or whether the striatum may also co...

A network of regions including the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the striatum are integral to visuomotor associative learning. Here, we evaluated the contributions of the structures of the striatum and the MTL, as well as their interactions during an arbitrary associative learning task. We hypothesized that activity in the striatum would correlate with the rate of learning, while activity in t...

Recent research in instrumental conditioning has focused on the striatum, particularly the role of the dorsal striatum in the learning processes that contribute to instrumental performance in rats. This research has found evidence of what appear to be parallel, functionally and anatomically distinct circuits involving dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and dorsolateral striatum (DLS) that contribute to...

In the cortex and hippocampus, neuronal oscillations of different frequencies can be observed in local field potentials (LFPs). LFPs oscillations in the theta band (6-10 Hz) have also been observed in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) of rodents, mostly during locomotion, and have been proposed to mediate behaviorally-relevant interactions between striatum and cortex (or between striatum and hipp...

Classical estrogen receptor-signaling mechanisms involve estradiol binding to intracellular nuclear receptors [estrogen receptor-alpha (ERalpha) and estrogen receptor-beta (ERbeta)] to promote changes in protein expression. Estradiol can also exert effects within seconds to minutes, however, a timescale incongruent with genomic signaling. In the brain, estradiol rapidly potentiates stimulated d...

Cognitive deficits are recognized in Parkinson's disease. Understanding cognitive functions mediated by the striatum can clarify some of these impairments and inform treatment strategies. The dorsal striatum, a region impaired in Parkinson's disease, has been implicated in stimulus-response learning. However, most investigations combine acquisition of associations between stimuli, responses, or...

When retrospective revaluation phenomena (e.g., unovershadowing: AB+, then A-, then test B) were discovered, simple elemental models were at a disadvantage because they could not explain such phenomena. Extensions of these models and novel models appealed to within-compound associations to accommodate these new data. Here, we present an elemental, neural network model of conditioning that expla...

Extensive evidence implicates the ventral striatum in multiple distinct facets of action selection. Early work established a role in modulating ongoing behavior, as engaged by the energizing and directing influences of motivationally relevant cues and the willingness to expend effort in order to obtain reward. More recently, reinforcement learning models have suggested the notion of ventral str...

The exact neural processes behind humans' drive to acquire a new language--first as infants and later as second-language learners--are yet to be established. Recent theoretical models have proposed that during human evolution, emerging language-learning mechanisms might have been glued to phylogenetically older subcortical reward systems, reinforcing human motivation to learn a new language. Su...