The seeking system pertains to one of the most basic psycho-behavioural phenomena, the seeking urge. This need has been known under a number of related names, such as drives, which psychoanalysts have addressed, or an incentive salience, a subject of behavioural neuroscientists. The name reward system given to it has been in use for six decades and yet is substantially inaccurate and wrong. The concept of reward is actually ambiguous and its scope can be significantly distinguished by different motivational and hedonic aspects, not just psychologically but also on a clinical and neurobiological level as well. The system itself neither generates a reward, nor mediates sensoric pleasure, but rather it contributes toward the emergence of motivational states targeted to incentive salient stimuli in the external environment. Because a positive hedonic experience appears only when such stimuli are attained, the reward system is more appropriately understood as a system seeking those incentives than as a system providing satisfaction after having interacted with them.

Key words: dopamine system – mesolimbic system – incentive salience – reward – reward system – seeking system