Integrating hippocampus and striatum in decision-making

Learning and memory and navigation literatures emphasize interactions between multiple memory systems: a flexible, planning-based system and a rigid, cached-value system. This has profound implications for decision-making. Recent conceptualizations of flexible decision-making employ prospection and projection arising from a network involving the hippocampus. Recent recordings from rodent hippocampus in decision-making situations have found transient forward-shifted representations. Evaluation of that prediction and subsequent action-selection probably occurs downstream (e.g. in orbitofrontal cortex, in ventral and dorsomedial striatum). Classically, striatum has been identified as a crucial component of the less-flexible, incremental system. Current evidence, however, suggests that striatum is involved in both flexible and stimulus-response decision-making, with dorsolateral striatum involved in stimulus-response strategies and ventral and dorsomedial striatum involved in goal-directed strategies.