In this paper, we attempt to rehabilitate the notion of role by linking sociological theory recent work on motivational, affective, and cognitive neuroscience specifying internal mechanisms behind motivated action. We argue that there is nothing inherently problematic or retrogressive in idea “role,” once its link a purely normative account action severed. Instead, conceptualizing roles as emer...

Choosing between smaller, assured rewards or larger, uncertain ones requires reconciliation of competing biases toward more certain or riskier options. We used disconnection and neuroanatomical techniques to reveal that separate, yet interconnected, neural pathways linking the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the basolateral amygdala (BLA), and nucleus accumbens (NAc) contribute to these differe...

The value of events that predict future rewards, thereby driving behavior, is sensitive to information arising from external (environmental) and internal factors. The ventral prefrontal cortex, an anatomically heterogeneous area, has information related to this value. We designed experiments to compare the contribution of two distinct subregions, orbital and ventromedial, of the ventral prefron...

The internal state of an organism affects its choices. Previous studies in various non-human animals have demonstrated a complex, and in some cases non-monotonic, interaction between internal state and risk preferences. Our aim was to examine the systematic effects of deprivation on human decision-making across various reward types. Using both a non-parametric approach and a classical economic ...

To learn, obtain reward and survive, humans and other animals must monitor, approach and act on objects that are associated with variable or unknown rewards. However, the neuronal mechanisms that mediate behaviours aimed at uncertain objects are poorly understood. Here we demonstrate that a set of neurons in an internal-capsule bordering regions of the primate dorsal striatum, within the putame...

The phasic firing of dopamine neurons has been theorized to encode a reward-prediction error as formalized by the temporal-difference (TD) algorithm in reinforcement learning. Most TD models of dopamine have assumed a stimulus representation, known as the complete serial compound, in which each moment in a trial is distinctly represented. We introduce a more realistic temporal stimulus represen...

Sensitivity to time, including the time of reward, guides the behaviour of all organisms. Recent research suggests that all major reward structures of the brain process the time of reward occurrence, including midbrain dopamine neurons, striatum, frontal cortex and amygdala. Neuronal reward responses in dopamine neurons, striatum and frontal cortex show temporal discounting of reward value. The...

A recent flurry of neuroimaging and decision-making experiments in humans, when combined with single-unit data from orbitofrontal cortex, suggests major additions to current models of reward processing. We review these data and models and use them to develop a specific computational relationship between the value of a predictor and the future rewards or punishments that it promises. The resulti...