Believing is representation mediated by the dopamine brain system

Abstract

The capacity to predict future outcomes is critical for driving appropriate behaviour. Predictions are based on conscious or non‐conscious hypotheses about either harmful events including threats to life, or beneficial events such as reward. These hypotheses represent what might be called belief states that become stabilized by reinforcement learning. Babayan and colleagues (2018) have recently reported that in mice, reward prediction modulated dopamine activity in the basal ganglia as a non‐monotonic function of the reward size.

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