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Reconstructing dopamine's link to reward (2024)
The field is grappling with whether to modify the long-standing theory of reward prediction error—or abandon it entirely.
Once experiments moved from classical conditioning, as in the original monkey study, to rodents navigating virtual environments, researchers began seeing an unusual ramping up of dopamine signals as the animals approached a reward, as first reported in a 2013 paper. The original model must constantly keep track of the amount of time that has passed following every potential cue that might later be associated with a reward, which may work fine for a computer algorithm—but not for a human or other animal, he says. For instance, most experiments testing it use animals that are almost fully trained on a task—rather than those that are learning the task from scratch—to produce more robust results, says Joshua Dudman, senior group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.
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