Work

Ventral–striatal/nucleus–accumbens sensitivity to prediction errors during classification learning

Year: 2005

Type: article

Abstract: A prominent theory in neuroscience suggests reward learning is driven by the discrepancy between a subject's expectation of an outcome and the actual outcome itself. Furthermore, it is postulated that midbrain dopamine neurons relay this mismatch to target regions including the ventral striatum. Using functional MRI (fMRI), we tested striatal responses to prediction errors for probabilistic classification learning with purely cognitive feedback. We used a version of the Rescorla-Wagner model to generate prediction errors for each subject and then entered these in a parametric analysis of fMRI activity. Activation in ventral striatum/nucleus-accumbens (Nacc) increased parametrically with prediction error for negative feedback. This result extends recent neuroimaging findings in reward learning by showing that learning with cognitive feedback also depends on the same circuitry and dopaminergic signaling mechanisms.

Source: Human Brain Mapping

DOI: 10.1002/hbm.20186

Authors: P. F. Rodriguez, A.R. Aron, R.A. Poldrack

Institutions: University of California, Irvine, University of California, Los Angeles

Language: English

Topic: Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning