Midbrain dopamine neurons signal preference for advance information about upcoming rewards

By Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, Okihide Hikosaka. 2009

898 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY The desire to know what the future holds is a powerful motivator in everyday life, but it is unknown how this desire is created by neurons in the brain. Here we show that when macaque monkeys are offered a water reward of variable magnitude, they seek advance information about its size. Furthermore, the same midbrain dopamine neurons that signal the expected amount of water also signal the expectation of information, in a manner that is correlated with the strength of the animal’s preference. Our data shows that single dopamine neurons process both primitive and cognitive rewards, and suggests that current theories of reward-seeking must be revised to include information-seeking.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Burst-dependent synaptic plasticity can coordinate learning in hierarchical circuits (2020, background): “This term abstracts a number of possible sources of control of plasticity, like dendritic 222 inhibition [62,73,85], or disinhibition through vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP)-positive cells [86], burst 223 sizes [71, 87] or transient neuromodulation [14,88,89].”
Dopamine, Affordance and Active Inference (2012, positive): “The precision hypothesis also accounts for the finding that dopaminergic neurons fire in response to stimuli that predict the subsequent availability of predictive information about upcoming reward, even though such stimuli convey no information about the reward itself [132].”
GRAIL: A Goal-Discovering Robotic Architecture for Intrinsically-Motivated Learning (2016, background): “Other neuroscientific evidence [20], [81] reveal the importance of information-seeking behavior and mechanisms without directly referring to IMs.”
Attention, learning and the value of information (2012, methodology): “shown in Figure 3B, in an experiment in which monkeys were initially uncertain about the size of a reward and at the time marked ‘‘Cue’’ received a visual signal that conveyed information about the expected reward (Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka, 2009).”
Active Inference: A Process Theory (2017, background): “This repetition suppression is accompanied by profound changes in simulated dopamine responses that effectively reproduce the transfer of phasic dopamine responses from unconditioned to conditioned stimuli during learning (Schultz, Apicella, & Ljungberg, 1993; Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009).”
Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting (2010, positive): “A recent study in monkeys found that DA neurons signal this preference (Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka, 2009).”
Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots: an overview (2014, positive): “…with the delivery of apparently neutral stimuli: for example, monkeys were trained to perform actions to gain access to a window from which they could observe conspeciﬁcs (Butler, 1953), and mice were trained to perform actions that resulted in clicks or in moving the cage platform (Kish, 1955).”