Nucleus accumbens dopamine release reflects Bayesian inference during instrumental learning.

ABSTRACT: Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens has been hypothesized to signal reward prediction error, the difference between observed and predicted reward, suggesting a biological implementation for reinforcement learning. Rigorous tests of this hypothesis require assumptions about how the brain maps sensory signals to reward predictions, yet this mapping is still poorly understood. In particular, the mapping is non-trivial when sensory signals provide ambiguous information about the hidden state of the environment. Previous work using classical conditioning tasks has suggested that reward predictions are generated conditional on probabilistic beliefs about the hidden state, such that dopamine implicitly reflects these beliefs. Here we test this hypothesis in the context of an instrumental ta

SUBMITTER: Qu AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10680647 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature