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Reward is an appealing or appetitive concept that can be applied to an object or a situation, which positively reinforces a response, satisfies a motive or intent, or signals pleasure.
By combining advanced mathematical modelling with data from a rare sample of patients with brain damage, the authors show that a specific part of the brain in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with putting in effort to help other people.
The extent to which brains employ Bayesian principles remains unclear. Here, the authors provide evidence suggesting that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex represent the modulation of reward expectation (i.e., prior values) with incoming sensory inputs to compute confidence values.
Ventral pallidum GABA and glutamate neuron activation drives approach and avoidance, respectively. Here, the authors show that both ventral pallidum cell types are activated during approach to reward and by aversive stimuli, but elicit opponent effects on VTA cell-type activity.
Physiologically relevant stimulation of dopamine neurons does not function as a reward and does not endow cues with a reward representation. However, high-frequency stimulation is represented as a sensory-specific goal that motivates behavior.
Muller et al. demonstrate that reward signals recorded from the frontal cortex of nonhuman primates exhibit a population-based scheme for learning probability distributions over reward values. This study provides evidence that neural signals outside of the midbrain reflect the principles of distributional reinforcement-learning theory.
A study in mice helps to resolve a debate surrounding striatal DA dynamics and reward benefit or cost and also reveals motivation and transient striatal DA release have a bidirectional causal relationship.
Increasing levels of glial-derived neurotrophic factor using a gene-therapy approach in a macaque model of alcohol use disorder resulted in a lower tendency to relapse into alcohol consumption after a period of abstinence.