Dissociable roles of ventral and dorsal striatum
in instrumental conditioning
John O'Doherty et al
Science 304 452-454.
Abstract
Instrumental conditioning studies how animals and humans choose actions
appropriate to the affective structure of an environment. According to recent
reinforcement learning models, two distinct components are involved - a 'critic',
which learns to predict future reward, and an 'actor', which maintains information
about the rewarding outcomes of actions to enable better ones to be chosen more
frequently. We scanned human subjects with fMRI while they engaged in
instrumental conditioning. Our results suggest partly dissociable contributions of
ventral and dorsal striatum, with the former corresponding to the critic and the
latter to the actor.
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