Featured Paper of the Month – March 2020
Published in Elife by Stalnaker, Thomas A; Howard, James D; Takahashi, Yuji K; Gershman, Samuel J; Kahnt, Thorsten; Schoenbaum, Geoffrey
Midbrain dopamine neurons have long been thought to collectively signal a value prediction error, indicating whether the value of an event is greater or less than expected. A few years ago, our lab showed that these neurons also signal if an event is different than expected, without regard for value. In this paper, we build on this prior result by showing in both rats and humans that dopamine neurons or midbrain BOLD voxels, as a group, signal which unexpected event has occurred…