PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Timothy H. Muller
AU  - James L. Butler
AU  - Sebastijan Veselic
AU  - Bruno Miranda
AU  - Timothy E.J. Behrens
AU  - Zeb Kurth-Nelson
AU  - Steven W. Kennerley
TI  - Distributional reinforcement learning in prefrontal cortex
AID  - 10.1101/2021.06.14.448422
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.06.14.448422
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/15/2021.06.14.448422.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/15/2021.06.14.448422.full
AB  - Prefrontal cortex is crucial for learning and decision-making. Classic reinforcement learning (RL) theories centre on learning the expectation of potential rewarding outcomes and explain a wealth of neural data in prefrontal cortex. Distributional RL, on the other hand, learns the full distribution of rewarding outcomes and better explains dopamine responses. Here we show distributional RL also better explains prefrontal cortical responses, suggesting it is a ubiquitous mechanism for reward-guided learning.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.