TY - JOUR T1 - Causal evidence supporting the proposal that dopamine transients function as a <em>temporal difference</em> prediction error JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/520965 SP - 520965 AU - Etienne JP Maes AU - Melissa J Sharpe AU - Matthew P.H. Gardner AU - Chun Yun Chang AU - Geoffrey Schoenbaum AU - Mihaela D. Iordanova Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/17/520965.abstract N2 - Reward-evoked dopamine is well-established as a prediction error. However the central tenet of temporal difference accounts – that similar transients evoked by reward-predictive cues also function as errors – remains untested. To address this, we used two phenomena, second-order conditioning and blocking, in order to examine the role of dopamine in prediction error versus reward prediction. We show that optogenetically-shunting dopamine activity at the start of a reward-predicting cue prevents second-order conditioning without affecting blocking. These results support temporal difference accounts by providing causal evidence that cue-evoked dopamine transients function as prediction errors. ER -