Topic: non-local neural activity

Predicting the future outcomes of actions forms the basis for reinforcement learning to shape goal-directed behaviours. Recent work showed that learning based on predicting future sensory experience using the current state and action of an agent leads to representations that resemble those in the brain, for instance place and grid cells of the medial temporal lobe. Here we ask if combining ongoing predictive learning of sensory events and of notional value of actions leading to rewards forms representations that enable more efficient goal-directed learning than reinforcement learning alone. Si