ArticleCurrent opinion in behavioral sciences2021
What is dopamine doing in model-based reinforcement learning?
Article in Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prediction error correlates in the striosome-dopamine circuit emerge from information gain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Building Goal-Directed Cognitive Graphs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A brief history of dopamine prediction errors.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Review
- Data-driven equation discovery reveals nonlinear reinforcement learning in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The curious case of dopaminergic prediction errors and learning associative information beyond value.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Devaluing memories of reward: a case for dopamine.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Complementary roles of serotonin and dopamine in model-based learning.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2025Article
- Biomarker discovery using machine learning in the psychosis spectrum.Biomarkers in neuropsychiatry · 2024Article
- Dopamine Release in the Nucleus Accumbens Core Encodes the General Excitatory Components of Learning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Dopamine-independent effect of rewards on choices through hidden-state inference.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Dopamine Increases Accuracy and Lengthens Deliberation Time in Explicit Motor Skill Learning.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Neural Representation of Costs and Rewards in Decision Making.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Experiments have implicated dopamine in model-based reinforcement learning (RL). These findings are unexpected as dopamine is thought to encode a reward prediction error (RPE), which is the key teaching signal in model-free RL. Here we examine two possible accounts for dopamine's involvement in model-based RL: the first that dopamine neurons carry a prediction error used to update a type of predictive state representation called a successor representation, the second that two well established aspects of dopaminergic activity, RPEs and surprise signals, can together explain dopamine's involvement in model-based RL.
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.