Just a reminder that we have guest speaker Dr Vincent Costa giving a talk at YNiC this afternoon at 4pm, followed by refreshments. This
promises to be an interesting session, and we encourage you all to
attend:
Title: More than a feeling: A comparison of amygdala and ventral striatum contributions to reinforcement learning
Abstract: If you ask a neuroscientist about emotion, they would probably give
you the skinny about every amygdala study ever written. If you ask them
about reward, they would probably give you a syllabus filled with
references to the ventral striatum. But
I’ll bet they can’t tell you what specific computations are computed in
the amygdala relative to the ventral striatum. This is because
traditional views of reinforcement learning have held that the striatum
integrates dopaminergic reward prediction errors
to facilitate learning, but have not ascribed a specific role for the
amygdala. After decades of research suggesting the amygdala mainly
contributes to emotion and simpler forms of associative learning,
researchers are just beginning to explore the computational
boundaries of amygdala function. The emerging perspective, which I will
discuss, is that standard accounts of reinforcement learning that
emphasize stratal and cortical contributions, should be revised to
include a key role for the amygdala.