The reward integrator
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2020-10-02
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LeGates, Tara; The reward integrator; Science, Vol. 370, Issue 6512, pp. 46 (2020); https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6512/46.1.summary
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Abstract
Rewards are powerful stimuli that drive and reinforce goal-directed behaviors. There are a variety of factors that contribute to this process—such as motivation, anticipation, and contextual information—that are encoded in different brain regions. As a result, normal reward-related behaviors require proper functional integration of signals from multiple brain regions, but the essential pathways and underlying mechanisms of integration remain elusive. We have found that a critical mediator of this behavior is the connection between the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens (NAc)