Dissociable effects of surprising rewards on learning and memory.

ABSTRACT: Reward-prediction errors track the extent to which rewards deviate from expectations, and aid in learning. How do such errors in prediction interact with memory for the rewarding episode? Existing findings point to both cooperative and competitive interactions between learning and memory mechanisms. Here, we investigated whether learning about rewards in a high-risk context, with frequent, large prediction errors, would give rise to higher fidelity memory traces for rewarding events than learning in a low-risk context. Experiment 1 showed that recognition was better for items associated with larger absolute prediction errors during reward learning. Larger prediction errors also led to higher rates of learning about rewards. Interestingly we did not find a relationship between learning rate

SUBMITTER: Rouhani N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6117220 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature