During her time with Walle Nauta, she also performed anterograde and retrograde tracing studies to study the neural projections from the amygdala to the striatum.[1][16] They showed that these projection were much more extensive than previously thought, and that the amygdala innervates large parts of the caudal striatum.[14][16] As the amygdala is involved in motivation they speculated that the striatum may in fact also be mediated in a large part by motivation.[14][16]