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Dopamine signals mimic reward prediction errors

An Erratum to this article was published on 21 November 2014

This article has been updated

Modern theories of associative learning center on a prediction error. A study finds that artificial activation of dopamine neurons can substitute for missing reward prediction errors to rescue blocked learning.

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Figure 1: Prediction errors and blocking.

Katie Vicari

Change history

  • 01 July 2013

    In the version of this article initially published, Mihaela D. Iordanova's affiliation was given as the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland Baltimore County instead of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Maryland, School of Medicine, and the former was omitted from Geoffrey Schoenbaum's affiliations. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Correspondence to Geoffrey Schoenbaum.

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Schoenbaum, G., Esber, G. & Iordanova, M. Dopamine signals mimic reward prediction errors. Nat Neurosci 16, 777–779 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3448

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