Susana Mingote

TL;DR: Along with prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, nucleus accumbens is a component of the brain circuitry regulating effort-related functions and may have implications for understanding drug abuse, as well as energy-related disorders such as psychomotor slowing, fatigue, or anergia in depression.

TL;DR: According to the dopamine (DA) hypothesis of reward, DA systems in the brain, particularly in the nucleus accumbens, are thought to directly mediate the rewarding or primary motivational characteristics of natural stimuli such as food, water and sex, as well as various drugs of abuse.

TL;DR: Accumbens DA may be important for enabling rats to overcome behavioral constraints, such as work-related response costs, and may be critical for the behavioral organization and conditioning processes that enable animals to engage in vigorous responses, or to emit large numbers of responses in ratio schedules in the absence of primary reinforcement.

TL;DR: It is shown that dopamine neurons make direct fast dopaminergic and glutamatergic connections with cholinergic interneurons, with regional heterogeneity.

TL;DR: Accumbens adenosine A2A receptors appear to regulate behavioral activation and effort-related processes by modulating the activity of the ventral striatopallidal pathway.