Publications

Spontaneous animal behaviour is built from action modules that are concatenated by the brain into sequences^1,2. However, the neural mechanisms that guide the composition of naturalistic, self-motivated behaviour remain unknown. Here we show that dopamine...

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) error) used in machine learning. However, previous studies failed to observe...

Reinforcement learning models of the basal ganglia map the phasic dopamine signal to reward prediction errors (RPEs). Conventional models assert that, when a stimulus predicts a reward with fixed delay, dopamine activity during the delay should converge...

In the brain, dopamine is thought to drive reward-based learning by signaling temporal difference reward prediction errors (TD errors), a ‘teaching signal’ used to train computers. Recent studies using optogenetic manipulations have provided multiple...

Different regions of the striatum regulate different types of behavior. However, how dopamine signals differ across striatal regions and how dopamine regulates different behaviors remain unclear. Here, we compared dopamine axon activity in the ventral...

Learning from successes and failures often improves the quality of subsequent decisions. Past outcomes, however, should not influence purely perceptual decisions after task acquisition is complete since these are designed so that only sensory evidence...

Since its introduction, the reward prediction error theory of dopamine has explained a wealth of empirical phenomena, providing a unifying framework for understanding the representation of reward and value in the brain^1,2,3. According to the now canonical...

Reinforcement-learning theories provide a normative perspective on learning and decision-making. In the 1990s, neurophysiology experiments revealed an exceptional correspondence between the activity of midbrain dopamine neurons and the reward prediction...

Learning about rewards and punishments is critical for survival. Classical studies have demonstrated an impressive correspondence between the firing of dopamine neurons in the mammalian midbrain and the reward prediction errors of reinforcement learning...

Rapid phasic activity of midbrain dopamine neurons is thought to signal reward prediction errors (RPEs), resembling temporal difference errors used in machine learning. However, recent studies describing slowly increasing dopamine signals have instead...

Midbrain dopamine signals are widely thought to report reward prediction errors that drive learning in the basal ganglia. However, dopamine has also been implicated in various probabilistic computations, such as encoding uncertainty and controlling...