Learning to Express Reward Prediction Error-like Dopaminergic Activity Requires Plastic Representations of Time.

ABSTRACT: The dominant theoretical framework to account for reinforcement learning in the brain is temporal difference (TD) reinforcement learning. The TD framework predicts that some neuronal elements should represent the reward prediction error (RPE), which means they signal the difference between the expected future rewards and the actual rewards. The prominence of the TD theory arises from the observation that firing properties of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area appear similar to those of RPE model-neurons in TD learning. Previous implementations of TD learning assume a fixed temporal basis for each stimulus that might eventually predict a reward. Here we show that such a fixed temporal basis is implausible and that certain predictions of TD learning are inconsistent with expe

SUBMITTER: Cone I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10543312 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature