Ventral tegmental area | EPFL Graph Search

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) (tegmentum is Latin for covering), also known as the ventral tegmental area of Tsai, or simply ventral tegmentum, is a group of neurons located close to the midline on the floor of the midbrain. The VTA is the origin of the dopaminergic cell bodies of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system and other dopamine pathways; it is widely implicated in the drug and natural reward circuitry of the brain. The VTA plays an important role in a number of processes, including reward cognition (motivational salience, associative learning, and positively-valenced emotions) and orgasm, among others, as well as several psychiatric disorders. Neurons in the VTA project to numerous areas of the brain, ranging from the prefrontal cortex to the caudal brainstem and several regions in between. Neurobiologists have often had great difficulty distinguishing the VTA in humans and other primate brains from the substantia nigra (SN) and surrounding nuclei. Originally, the ventral tegmental area was designated as a ‘nucleus’, but over time ‘area’ became the more appropriate term used because of the heterogeneous cytoarchitectonic features of the region and the lack of clear borders that separate it from adjacent regions. Because of the selective limbic-related afferents to the VTA, the cells of the VTA are given the designation A10 to differentiate them from surrounding cells. The ventral tegmental area is in the midbrain between several other major areas, some of which are described here. The mammillary bodies and the posterior hypothalamus, both included in the diencephalon, extend rostrally from the VTA. The red nucleus is situated laterally and oculomotor fibers are situated ventromedially to the VTA. The pons and the hindbrain lie caudally to the VTA. Finally, the substantia nigra is located laterally to the VTA. In 1987, Oades identified four primary nuclei in the VTA A10 group of cells: the nucleus paranigralis (Npn), the nucleus parabrachialis pigmentosus (Npbp), the nucleus interfascicularis (Nif), and the nucleus linearis (Nln) caudalis and rostralis.

Non-invasive stimulation of the human striatum disrupts reinforcement learning of motor skills

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Elena Beanato, Esra Neufeld, Fabienne Windel, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Traian Popa, Julie Duqué

Reinforcement feedback can improve motor learning, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain underexplored. In particular, the causal contribution of specific patterns of oscillatory activity within the human striatum is unknown. To address this question, ...

Nature Portfolio2024

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023