The striatum is essential for learning which actions lead to reward and for implementing
those actions. Decades of experimental and theoretical work have led to several influential …

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework of particular importance to psychology,
neuroscience and machine learning. Interactions between these fields, as promoted through …

Social interactions are motivated behaviors that, in many species, facilitate learning.
However, how the brain encodes the reinforcing properties of social interactions remains …

There is increased appreciation that dopamine neurons in the midbrain respond not only to
reward and reward-predicting cues,, but also to other variables such as the distance to …

Animals make predictions to guide their behavior and update those predictions through
experience. Transient increases in dopamine (DA) are thought to be critical signals for …

A large body of evidence has indicated that the phasic responses of midbrain dopamine
neurons show a remarkable similarity to a type of teaching signal (temporal difference (TD) …

Dopaminergic projection axons from the midbrain to the striatum are crucial for motor
control, as their degeneration in Parkinson disease results in profound movement deficits …

The number of papers about the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has grown from 1 per month in
1987 to a current rate of over 50 per month. This publication stream has implicated the OFC …

Striatal dopamine drives associative learning by acting as a teaching signal. Much work has
focused on simple learning paradigms, including Pavlovian and instrumental learning …

Dopamine neurons facilitate learning by calculating reward prediction error, or the difference
between expected and actual reward. Despite two decades of research, it remains unclear …