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4 months ago
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- RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
- 18 June 2025
The activity of neuronal cells that release the neurotransmitter dopamine is thought to encode differences between predicted and actual rewards. This ‘prediction error’ is key to reinforcement learning. It emerges that dopamine neurons differ in their timescales for temporal discounting, enabling the brain to implement sophisticated reinforcement-learning algorithms along multiple timescales.
This is a summary of: Masset, P. et al. Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain. Nature 642, 682–690 (2025).
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01867-6
‘Expert opinion’ is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
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Read the paper: Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain
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