OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Phasic dopamine responses are thought to encode a prediction-error signal consistent with model-free reinforcement learning theories. However, a number of recent findings highlight the influence of model-based computations on dopamine responses, and suggest that dopamine prediction errors reflect more dimensions of an expected outcome than scalar reward value. In this talk I will focus on these challenges to the scalar prediction-error theory of dopamine, and to the strict dichotomy between model-based and model-free learning, suggesting that these may better be viewed as a set of intertwined computations rather than two alternative systems. Alas, phasic dopamine signals, until recently a beacon of computationally-interpretable brain activity, may not be as simple as we once hoped they were.