Retrospective and prospective coding for predicted reward in the sensory thalamus

✍ Scribed by Komura, Yutaka; Tamura, Ryoi; Uwano, Teruko; Nishijo, Hisao; Kaga, Kimitaka; Ono, Taketoshi

• Book ID: 109775491
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 418 KB
• Volume: 412
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0028-0836
• DOI: 10.1038/35087595

✦ Synopsis

Reward is important for shaping goal-directed behaviour 1±4 . After stimulus±reward associative learning, an organism can assess the motivational value of the incoming stimuli on the basis of past experience (retrospective processing), and predict forthcoming rewarding events (prospective processing) 1±5 . The traditional role of the sensory thalamus is to relay current sensory information to cortex. Here we ®nd that non-primary thalamic neurons respond to reward-related events in two ways. The early, phasic responses occurred shortly after the onset of the stimuli and depended on the sensory modality. Their magnitudes resisted extinction and correlated with the learning experience. The late responses