What is the ventral striatum?

The ventral striatum is a subcortical brain region innervated with dopaminergic neurons and involved in tracking the subjective value of stimuli, signaling the presence of/expectation of reward, and encoding errors and outcomes of such predictions (Knutson et al., 2001; Phan et al., 2002; Eldar et al., 2016).

What are the parts of the striatum?

The striatum is composed of three nuclei: caudate, putamen, and ventral striatum. The latter contains the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). The caudate and putamen/ventral striatum are separated by the internal capsule, a white matter tract between brain cortex and brainstem.

What is striatum mean?

Striatum: Part of the basal ganglia of the brain. The basal ganglia are interconnected masses of gray matter located in the interior regions of the cerebral hemispheres and in the upper part of the brainstem. The striatum is also called the striate body. It includes the caudate nucleus and the lentiform nucleus.

What does ventral mean in biology?

The ventral (from Latin venter ‘belly’) surface refers to the front, or lower side, of an organism. For example, in a fish, the pectoral fins are dorsal to the anal fin, but ventral to the dorsal fin.

What is the ventral striatum and what does it do?

It has been well established that the ventral striatum is strongly involved in mediating the reinforcing effects of drugs, especially stimulants, through dopaminergic stimulation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term “corpus striatum” was used to designate many distinct, deep, infracortical elements of the hemisphere.

What is the difference between ventral and dorsal striatum?

The ventral striatum consists of the nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle. The dorsal striatum consists of the caudate nucleus and the putamen.

What is the dorsal and ventral surface?

The dorsal (from Latin dorsum, meaning ‘back’) surface of an organism refers to the back, or upper side, of an organism. If talking about the skull, the dorsal side is the top. The ventral (from Latin venter, meaning ‘belly’) surface refers to the front, or lower side, of an organism.