ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2022
Mesolimbic dopamine release conveys causal associations.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 117 papers.
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Who cites it
117 citing papers in PubMed.
- The synergy of methylphenidate- and reconsolidation-based extinction normalizes ventromedial prefrontal function in drug addiction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Trial
- Automatic value learning results in counterproductive human behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Probing biomarkers and clinical utility of reward learning across species using the Probabilistic Reward Task: 20 years of findings.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Prediction error correlates in the striosome-dopamine circuit emerge from information gain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Chronic ethanol self-administration alters dopamine in the caudate nucleus and putamen of rhesus macaques in a sex-dependent manner.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Methamphetamine potentiates the use of outcome-specific associations via a hypothalamic-dopamine circuit.Neuron · 2026Article
- Disinhibition of ventral tegmental area during initial punishment learning causes enduring punishment insensitivity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Evolutionarily old brainstem neurons are required for the control of selective spatial attention.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mesocorticostriatal Reinforcement Learning of State Representation and Value with Implications for the Mechanisms of Schizophrenia.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Ketogenic Diet Promotes Reward Learning by Upregulating Hippocampal CAMK2A Expression and Activating Dopamine Synaptic Signaling.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Dopamine and Acetylcholine in the Striatum: Circuit Interactions and Behavioral Control in Substance Use Disorders.Brain sciences · 2026Review
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- Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Temporal spacing of stimuli as a principle of predictive learning.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Building Goal-Directed Cognitive Graphs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Estimating the motor exploration in reinforcement learning.iScience · 2026Article
- Neural and psychosocial signatures of the comorbidity between pain and affective symptoms.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Memory erasure by dopamine-gated retrospective learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
57 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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 outcome deviates from expectations, and that such reward prediction errors (RPEs) are signaled by the mesolimbic dopamine system-a key controller of learning. However, instead of learning prospective predictions from RPEs, animals can infer predictions by learning the retrospective cause of rewards. Hence, whether mesolimbic dopamine instead conveys a causal associative signal that sometimes resembles RPE remains unknown. We developed an algorithm for retrospective causal learning and found that mesolimbic dopamine release conveys causal associations but not RPE, thereby challenging the dominant theory of reward learning. Our results reshape the conceptual and biological framework for associative learning.
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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.