Situationally appropriate behavior: translating situations into appetitive behavior modes.

If an organism's responding to its present location or more abstract situation is similar to its responding to discrete motivationally salient stimuli, then principles of stimulus-response relationships and their acquisition may apply to the organization of behavior that appears to be sensitive and appropriate to the organism's external context. Locations or situations become motivationally salient, insofar as they acquire the ability to compel the organism to obtain a specific type of reward through more or less constrained exploratory or foraging behavior. The ventral hippocampus is proposed to play a key role in linking a salient situation or location with an appropriate mode of behavior, whereas allocentric information predicted and updated by the dorsal hippocampus may be associated with, or translated into, a sequence of orienting and locomotor actions. The impact of ventral hippocampal representations of salient situations on behavior is mediated by the ventral subiculum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and ventral striatum. Projecting via the ventral subiculum to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, the ventral hippocampus maps motivationally salient environmental information, as well as emotional information reflective of the internal physiological milieu, onto an instrumental or emotional behavior mode that represents a specialized, more or less purposeful, state of behavioral arousal and global locomotor activation.