Abstract Recent innovations in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) have sped
data collection by enabling simultaneous scans of neural activity in multiple brain locations …

Our attention is strongly influenced by reward learning. Stimuli previously associated with
monetary reward have been shown to automatically capture attention in both behavioral and …

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 …

Reward has been shown to promote human performance in multiple task domains.
However, an important debate has developed about the uniqueness of reward-related …

It is controversial whether the adult primate early visual cortex is sufficiently plastic to cause
visual perceptual learning (VPL). The controversy occurs partially because most VPL studies …

The brain exhibits widespread endogenous responses in the absence of visual stimuli, even
at the earliest stages of visual cortical processing. Such responses have been studied in …

An optimal choice among alternative behavioral options requires precise anticipatory
representations of their possible outcomes. A fundamental question is how such anticipated …

Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) encode reward prediction errors and
can drive reinforcement learning through their projections to striatum, but much less is …

Recent functional imaging studies link reward-related activation of the midbrain substantia
nigra–ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), the site of origin of ascending dopaminergic …

Adaptive behavior is optimized in organisms that maintain flexible representations of the
value of sensory-predictive cues. To identify central representations of predictive reward …