The medial frontal cortex and adjacent orbitofrontal cortex have been the focus of
investigations of decision-making, behavioral flexibility, and social behavior. We review …

Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem:
how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move? It is …

Learning to predict rewards based on environmental cues is essential for survival. It is
believed that animals learn to predict rewards by updating predictions whenever the …

Animals make predictions to guide their behavior and update those predictions through
experience. Transient increases in dopamine (DA) are thought to be critical signals for …

A large body of work has aimed to define the precise information encoded by dopaminergic
projections innervating the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Prevailing models are based on …

Rewards are crucial objects that induce learning, approach behavior, choices, and
emotions. Whereas emotions are difficult to investigate in animals, the learning function is …

Rapid phasic activity of midbrain dopamine neurons is thought to signal reward prediction
errors (RPEs), resembling temporal difference errors used in machine learning. However …

Dopamine neurons facilitate learning by calculating reward prediction error, or the difference
between expected and actual reward. Despite two decades of research, it remains unclear …

We review the psychology and neuroscience of reinforcement learning (RL), which has
experienced significant progress in the past two decades, enabled by the comprehensive …

Pleasurable touch is paramount during social behavior, including sexual encounters.
However, the identity and precise role of sensory neurons that transduce sexual touch …