Investigations in humans can only examine in vivo striatal development at a systems level using neuroimaging methods. This methodological limitation precludes precise identification of how the dopamine system changes developmentally at the neural level. Rather, the link between striatal response to reward is only an index of presumed dopamine activity. These assumptions are based on insights gleaned from animal models of striatal circuitry and the dopamine system (e.g., Berridge and Robinson, 1998). As such, they are reviewed briefly here.
