Recent work suggests that fluctuations in dopamine delivery at target structures represent an evaluation of future events that can be used to direct learning and decision making. To examine the behavioral consequences of this interpretation, we gave simple decision making tasks to 66 human subjects and to a network based on a predictive model of mesencephalic dopamine systems. The human subjects displayed behavior similar to the network behavior in terms of choice allocation and the character of deliberation times. The agreement between human and model performances suggests a direct relationship between biases in human decision strategies and fluctuating dopamine delivery. We also show that the model offers a new interpretation of deficits that result when dopamine levels are increased or decreased through disease or pharmacological interventions. The bottom-up approach presented here also suggests that a variety of behavioral strategies may result from the expression of relatively simple neural mechanisms in different behavioral contexts
Egelman, D.M., Person, C., Montague, P.R. (1998). The computational role of dopamine delivery. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 10(5): 623-630.
Schultz, W., Dayan, P., Montague, P.R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science 275:1593-1599. [Abstract]
Montague, P.R. (1997) Biological substrates of predictive mechanisms in learning and action choice. Neural-Network Approaches to Cognition - Biobehavioral Foundations, J. Donahoe, ed, (Elsevier Science Publishers).
Montague PR, Dayan P, Sejnowski TJ (1996). A framework for mesencephalic dopamine systems based on predictive Hebbian learning. J. Neuroscience, 16(5):1936-47.[Abstract]
Montague, P.R., Dayan, P., Person, C., Sejnowski, T.J. (1995) Bee foraging in uncertain environments using predictive Hebbian learning. Nature 376:725-728. [Abstract] (News and Views 683-684).
Egelman, D.M., Person, C., Montague, P.R. (1995) A predictive model for diffuse systems matches human choices in a simple decision-making task. Soc. Neuro. Abst. 21:2087
Montague, P.R. and Sejnowski, T.J. (1994) The predictive brain: temporal coincidence and temporal order in synaptic learning mechanisms. Learn. and Mem. 1(1):1-33.