Habituation

Kutlu, Zachry, Melugin et al. show that dopamine in the nucleus accumbens core is evoked by novel, neutral stimuli and tracks stimulus familiarity in the absence of valence-based predictions. These signals influence the speed of future learning for familiar stimuli.

Habituation is a process in which animals stop responding to repetitive stimuli, and habituation is altered in autism and other conditions. Here, the authors describe visual habituation networks across the zebrafish brain, and find that fmr1 mutants show slower brain-wide and behavioural habituation.

A new study presenting two variations of the influential two-stage decision task shows that detailed task instructions lead participants to make model-based choices and that a simple model-free/model-based dichotomy does not describe behaviour well.