ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2019
Believing in dopamine.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 115 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
115 citing papers in PubMed.
- Upregulation of reward mesolimbic activity and immune response to vaccination: a randomized controlled trial.Nature medicine · 2026Trial
- Prior Expectations of Volatility Following Psychotherapy for Delusions: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2025Trial
- Dopamine manipulations modulate paranoid social inferences in healthy people.Translational psychiatry · 2020Trial
- Rapidly decreasing phasic dopamine responses precede a hedonic switch during satiation of sodium appetite.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A corticostriatal circuit updates subjective beliefs about latent task states.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Consensus Paper: Models of Cerebellar Functions.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2026Review
- Memory erasure by dopamine-gated retrospective learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A computational mechanism linking momentary craving and decision-making in alcohol drinkers and cannabis users.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Reconciling time and prediction error theories of associative learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reward-driven cerebellar climbing fiber activity influences both neural and behavioral learning.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- 20 Years of Aberrant Salience in Psychosis: What Have We Learned?The American journal of psychiatry · 2025Review
- Correctness is its own reward: bootstrapping error signals in self-guided reinforcement learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Activation of Dopamine D1 Receptors at the Axon Initial Segment-Like Process of Retinal AII Amacrine Cells Modulates Action Potential Firing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Data-driven equation discovery reveals nonlinear reinforcement learning in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of Bayesian social belief updating in the medial prefrontal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Reward-driven cerebellar climbing fiber activity influences both neural and behavioral learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Nucleus accumbens dopamine release reflects Bayesian inference during instrumental learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain.Nature · 2025Article
- The devilish details affecting TDRL models in dopamine research.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
55 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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 exploration. Here, we show how these different facets of dopamine signalling can be brought together under a common reinforcement learning framework. The key idea is that multiple sources of uncertainty impinge on reinforcement learning computations: uncertainty about the state of the environment, the parameters of the value function and the optimal action policy. Each of these sources plays a distinct role in the prefrontal cortex-basal ganglia circuit for reinforcement learning and is ultimately reflected in dopamine activity. The view that dopamine plays a central role in the encoding and updating of beliefs brings the classical prediction error theory into alignment with more recent theories of Bayesian reinforcement learning.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.