Operant learning articles from across Nature Portfolio

Using dopamine photometry and reinforcement learning models in mice flexibly acquiring cue–action–outcome associations with rule switches, Bernklau et al. show that striatal dopamine reflects an animal’s current understanding of their task.

During adolescence, we acquire skills and behavioural patterns that support our future survival through goal-directed learning. Wilbrecht and Davidow describe the neural and cognitive systems that support goal-directed learning in adolescence, as well as our growing understanding of the influence of context on this process.

Dopamine release in the brain is hypothesised to be related to unexpected changes in reward. Here, the authors combine PET and fMRI in humans to show individual differences in reward prediction error during a card guessing game are associated with dopamine receptor occupancy in the striatum.

Initial dopamine self-stimulations reinforced not only the stimulation-producing target action, but also actions similar to the target action and actions that occurred a few seconds before stimulation, and repeated pairings led to a gradual refinement of the behavioural repertoire to home in on the target actions.

The ventrolateral and medial orbitofrontal cortices are involved in selecting actions based on the value of expected outcomes. Malvaez and colleagues reveal that these brain regions are specialized in value encoding (ventrolateral orbitofrontal cortices) versus value memory retrieval (medial orbitofrontal cortices) and that they interact with the basolateral amygdala to orchestrate goal-oriented reward-seeking.