Topic: temporal difference RPE

Dopamine (DA) ramps are gradual increases in DA concentration observed during motivated behavior, contrasting with phasic DA release typically associated with signaling reward prediction errors (RPE). While RPE-related DA transients align with traditional models of reinforcement learning, where DA encodes the difference between expected and received rewards, dopamine ramps are less understood. Previous research demonstrated that DA ramps occur both at the level of DA cell bodies in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and at the axon terminals in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), specifically in the me