Evidence map›Paper›PMID 32898752›Full record

ReviewCurrent opinion in neurobiology2020

Actor-critic reinforcement learning in the songbird.

Ruidong Chen, Jesse H Goldberg

Abstract readReview
In one paragraph

Review in Current opinion in neurobiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
26citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

26 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Review
  3. Striatal Dopamine at Learned Sequence Boundaries Sustains Birdsong.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  4. Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Review
  11. Article
  12. Review
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Review
  17. Article
  18. Feasibility of dopamine as a vector-valued feedback signal in the basal ganglia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023
    Article
  19. An internal expectation guidesScience advances · 2022
    Article
  20. The neuroecology of the water-to-land transition and the evolution of the vertebrate brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Ruidong ChenDepartment of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, United States.
Jesse H GoldbergDepartment of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, United States. Electronic address: jesse.goldberg@cornell.edu.

Funding

Neural Mechanisms of Performance Evaluation During Motor Sequence LearningR01NS094667 · NINDS · CORNELL UNIVERSITY · PI GOLDBERG, JESSE HEYMANN · 2015 to 2024
$3.5M
NINDS NIH HHS R01 NS094667
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

It feels rewarding to ace your opponent on match point. Here, we propose common mechanisms underlie reward and performance learning. First, when a singing bird unexpectedly hits the right note, its dopamine (DA) neurons are activated as when a thirsty monkey receives an unexpected juice reward. Second, these DA signals reinforce vocal variations much as they reinforce stimulus-response associations. Third, limbic inputs to DA neurons signal the predicted quality of song syllables much like they signal the predicted reward value of a place or a stimulus during foraging. Finally, songbirds may solve difficult problems in reinforcement learning - such as credit assignment and catastrophic forgetting - with node perturbation and consolidation of reinforced vocal patterns in motor cortical circuits. Consolidation occurs downstream of a canonical 'actor-critic' circuit motif that learns to maximize performance quality in essentially the same way it learns to maximize reward: by computing and learning from prediction errors.

Indexed as

Motor CortexSongbirdsAnimalsDopaminergic NeuronsReinforcement, PsychologyRewardVocalization, Animal

Identifiers

PMID32898752
PMCPMC7769887

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

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.