ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
A dopamine mechanism for reward maximization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conditioned accumbal dopamine transients forecast individual preference for drug versus natural rewards and compulsive behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Topographically organized dorsal raphe activity modulates forebrain sensory-motor representations and contributes to defensive behaviors.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Prediction error correlates in the striosome-dopamine circuit emerge from information gain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mesolimbic Dopaminergic Encoding of Decision Value: Linking Phenotype-Specific Signals to Strategic Adaptation.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Mesocorticolimbic circuitry in episodic migraine: reward- and punishment-related responses and resting-state connectivity.The journal of headache and pain · 2026Article
- Article
- Value coding by primate amygdala neurons complies with the continuity axiom of economic choice theory.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Shared effects of one's own and others' experiences during reinforcement learning on episodic memory.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- The predictive processing embodied in brain conditions: the role of precision.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Development and Psychometric Validation of the Brain Rot Scale: Measuring Digital Content Overconsumption Among Generation Alpha and Generation Z.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- Discovery of the reward function for embodied reinforcement learning agents.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Mental health symptoms in Chinese children with sleep disorders and association with parental emotions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Local Regulation of Striatal Dopamine Release Shifts from Predominantly Cholinergic in Mice to GABAergic in Macaques.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neuroevolution insights into biological neural computation.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Effect of Music Therapy on Postoperative Pain Management in Patients with Oral Cancer: A Retrospective Study.Noise & healthArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Individual survival and evolutionary selection require biological organisms to maximize reward. Economic choice theories define the necessary and sufficient conditions, and neuronal signals of decision variables provide mechanistic explanations. Reinforcement learning (RL) formalisms use predictions, actions, and policies to maximize reward. Midbrain dopamine neurons code reward prediction errors (RPE) of subjective reward value suitable for RL. Electrical and optogenetic self-stimulation experiments demonstrate that monkeys and rodents repeat behaviors that result in dopamine excitation. Dopamine excitations reflect positive RPEs that increase reward predictions via RL; against increasing predictions, obtaining similar dopamine RPE signals again requires better rewards than before. The positive RPEs drive predictions higher again and thus advance a recursive reward-RPE-prediction iteration toward better and better rewards. Agents also avoid dopamine inhibitions that lower reward prediction via RL, which allows smaller rewards than before to elicit positive dopamine RPE signals and resume the iteration toward better rewards. In this way, dopamine RPE signals serve a causal mechanism that attracts agents via RL to the best rewards. The mechanism improves daily life and benefits evolutionary selection but may also induce restlessness and greed.
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.