Topic: post-outcome activity

Reinforcement learning implies to associate an outcome with an action performed in the past, sometimes several seconds after its execution. How the artificial intelligence and brain associate these two events refers to the credit assignment problem (CAP). We hypothesized that the required temporal convergence of an eligibility trace encoding the planned action, and the referring outcome of that action takes place in the same brain area, to reinforce an optimal policy. By using a combination of pharmacogenetic/optogenetic manipulations and one-photon calcium imaging in awake behaving mice, we p