Topic: cortico-striatal plasticity

Animal behavior is controlled through the coordinated action of multiple learning systems in the brain. One of these systems, the basal ganglia, instantiates a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm in which dopamine (DA) neurons transmit reward prediction error (RPE) signals---the difference between actual and expected rewards---to enable value learning via cortico-striatal plasticity. Recent studies have highlighted two novel aspects: first, that RPE signals from midbrain DA neurons can encode entire reward distributions through a distributional RL algorithm that mirrors cutting-edge machine