Topic: cue-reward associations

Learning to predict rewards based on environmental cues is essential for survival. It is widely believed that animals learn to predict rewards by updating predictions whenever the outcome deviates from expectations. Such violations of predictions are called reward prediction errors (RPEs). RPEs are the critical teaching signal in the most widely accepted model for associative learning—temporal difference reinforcement learning (TDRL). As TDRL RPE has been successful at explaining the activity dynamics of dopamine, it has become the dominant theory of dopamine’s role as the critical regulator o

Learning by experience that certain cues in the environment predict danger is crucial for survival. How dopamine (DA) circuits drive this form of associative learning is not fully understood. Here, we demonstrate that DA neurons projecting to a unique subregion of the dorsal striatum, the posterior tail of the striatum (TS), encode an aversive prediction error (PE) signal during associative fear learning. These DA neurons are necessary specifically during acquisition of fear learning, but not once the fear memory is formed, and are not required for forming cue-reward associations. Notably, tem