The anticipation of rewards turns out to have its own hedonic value, on top of that of the reward itself; a wide range of behavioral and neurophysiological data suggest that this anticipation is boosted by prediction errors.
Activity in the midbrain responds to unexpected changes in outcome identity (i.e. sensory prediction error) but does not scale with perceptual distance between expected and receipt reward.
The formation and refinement of prediction error circuits relies on an experience-dependent balance of excitation and inhibition in canonical microcircuits.
Midbrain dopamine neurons in rats signal discrepancies between predicted and actual rewards, regardless of whether the rewards are predicted on the basis of experience or inference.
Pronounced cerebellar activation during unexpected omission of a potentially harmful event suggests that the cerebellum has to be added to the neural network processing prediction errors underlying emotional associative learning.
Dopamine neurons signal value prediction errors (VPEs) integrating information about both reward and aversion, in low reward contexts, whereas VPEs in some dopamine neurons are distorted in high reward contexts.
Keeping flexible adaptable representations of speech categories at different time scales allows the brain to maintain stable perception in the face of varying speech sound characteristics.
