Topic: probabilistic outcomes

Animals must continually assess their uncertainty about their environment and future events in order to drive choice behavior and learning. Because uncertainty is a key decision variable for myriad behaviors (e.g. curiosity, attention), neuromodulatory systems, which engage and regulate diverse brain regions and brain states, are ideally suited to subserve uncertainty-guided modulation of local brain computations. Theoretical studies have hypothesized that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is responsible for encoding “expected uncertainty” in the brain (i.e., learned unreliability of predictive