Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)
Saori Tanaka, Kenji Doya, Go Okada, Kazutaka Ueda, Yasumasa Okamoto, Shigeto Yamawaki
To understand the brain mechanisms involved in reward prediction on different time scales, we developed a Markov decision task that requires prediction of both immediate and future rewards, and ana- lyzed subjects’ brain activities using functional MRI. We estimated the time course of reward prediction and reward prediction error on different time scales from subjects' performance data, and used them as the explanatory variables for SPM analysis. We found topog- raphic maps of different time scales in medial frontal cortex and striatum. The result suggests that different cortico-basal ganglia loops are specialized for reward prediction on different time scales.