The nucleus accumbens and inhibition in the ventral tegmental area play a causal role in the Kamin blocking effect.

The discovery of Kamin blocking led to the idea that associative learning occurs only when there is a mismatch between actual and predicted outcomes, or prediction error. The neural substrates involved in regulating this prediction error during behavioral learning are still not fully elucidated. We investigated in rats the role of the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens in Kamin blocking.