In recent years significant progress has been made delineating the psychological components of reward and their underlying neural mechanisms. Here we briefly highlight findings on three dissociable psychological components of reward: 'liking' (hedonic impact), 'wanting' (incentive salience), and learning (predictive associations and cognitions). A better understanding of the components of rewar...

Empirical studies of decision making have typically assumed that value learning is governed by time, such that a reward prediction error arising at a specific time triggers temporally-discounted learning for all preceding actions. However, in natural behavior, goals must be acquired through multiple actions, and each action can have different significance for the final outcome. As is recognized...

This chapter examines brain mechanisms of reward utility operating at particular decision moments in life-moments such as when one encounters an image, sound, scent, or other cue associated in the past with a particular reward or perhaps just when one vividly imagines that cue. Such a cue can often trigger a sudden motivational urge to pursue its reward and sometimes a decision to do so. Drawin...

What role does reward play in real-world human vision? Reward coding in the midbrain is thought to cause the rapid prioritization of reward-associated visual stimuli. However, existing evidence for this incentive salience hypothesis in vision is equivocal, particularly in naturalistic circumstances, and little is known about underlying neural systems. Here we use human fMRI to test whether rewa...

Three experiments investigated attentional and cognitive mechanisms in delay of gratification In each study preschool children could obtain a less preferred reward immediately or continue waiting indefinitely for a more preferred but delayed reward Experiment I compared the effects of external and cognitive distraction from the reward objects on the length of time which preschool children waite...

Adversity impacts many aspects of psychological and physical development including reward-based learning and decision-making. Mechanisms relating adversity and reward processing in children, however, remain unclear. Here, we show that adversity is associated with potentiated learning from positive outcomes and impulsive decision-making, but unrelated to learning from negative outcomes. We then ...

Most reinforcement learning models assume that the reward signal arrives after the activity that led to the reward, placing constraints on the possible underlying cellular mechanisms. Here we show that dopamine, a positive reinforcement signal, can retroactively convert hippocampal timing-dependent synaptic depression into potentiation. This effect requires functional NMDA receptors and is medi...

Human behaviour is generally guided by the anticipation of potential outcomes that are considered to be rewarding. Reward processing can thus be dissected into a phase of reward anticipation and a phase of reward consumption. A number of brain structures have been suggested to be involved in reward processing. However, it is unclear whether anticipation and consumption are mediated by the same ...

To understand the brain mechanisms involved in reward prediction on different time scales, we developed a Markov decision task that requires prediction of both immediate and future rewards, and analyzed subjects’ brain activities using functional MRI. We estimated the time course of reward prediction and reward prediction error on different time scales from subjects' performance data, and used ...