ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2025
Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Compressive learning scaffolds higher-order network structure to enhance human knowledge acquisition.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Experience-Dependent Reorganization of Hippocampal CA3 Neuronal Ensembles Associates With Memory Generalization.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- An abstract relational map emerges in the human medial prefrontal cortex with consolidation.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Contextual Modulation of Semantic Coherence in vmPFC Patients' Mental Constructions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- Divergent neural representations of space and task between physical and virtual navigation in macaques.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emotional learning selectively distorts the temporal organization of memory: A quantitative synthesis.Cognition · 2026Article
- The Emergence of New Schema Memory Requires Sleep.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Persistent representation of a prior schema in the orbitofrontal cortex facilitates learning of a conflicting schema.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Why animal models are still needed for discoveries in mental health research.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2026Article
- Distinct neural dynamics in the ventral hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex during social information processing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Prefrontal Cortex Responses to Conflicting Information.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- A compressed code for memory discrimination.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Neural variability in the default mode network compresses with increasing belief precision during Bayesian inference.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Complex Rule Transfer Recruits Rostral Prefrontal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Neural Networks.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Learning, prediction accuracy, and neural plasticity in sensory cortex.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2025Review
- Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Neural codes track prior events in a narrative and predict subsequent memory for details.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Potential for the medial prefrontal cortex to link mentalizing and attachment schemas.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Review
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
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Schemas are rich and complex knowledge structures about the typical unfolding of events in a context; for example, a schema of a dinner at a restaurant. In this Perspective, we suggest that reinforcement learning (RL), a computational theory of learning the structure of the world and relevant goal-oriented behaviour, underlies schema learning. We synthesize literature about schemas and RL to offer that three RL principles might govern the learning of schemas: learning via prediction errors, constructing hierarchical knowledge using hierarchical RL, and dimensionality reduction through learning a simplified and abstract representation of the world. We then suggest that the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex is involved in both schemas and RL due to its involvement in dimensionality reduction and in guiding memory reactivation through interactions with posterior brain regions. Last, we hypothesize that the amount of dimensionality reduction might underlie gradients of involvement along the ventral-dorsal and posterior-anterior axes of the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex. More specific and detailed representations might engage the ventral and posterior parts, whereas abstraction might shift representations towards the dorsal and anterior parts of the medial prefrontal cortex.
Indexed as
Identifiers
39775183What 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.