Suzanne M. Weber

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 indicated that DA depletions make animals sensitive to temporal or rate components of work that greatly influence responding on ratio schedules and relatively insensitive to different force requirements within the range tested.

TL;DR: Accumbens dopamine depletions interact with work requirements and blunt the rate‐enhancing effects of moderate size ratios, and also enhance the tendency to pause.

TL;DR: Evidence indicates that DA in nucleus accumbens is involved in activational aspects of motivation, and this line of research could have implications for understanding the brain circuitry involved in energy-related psychiatric disorders such as psychomotor slowing in depression, anergia, fatigue and apathy.