Flexible Learning of Cue-Reward Associations in Human Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

[ifat_levy]

Material below summarizes the article, Dissociating Value Representation and Inhibition of Inappropriate Affective Response During Reversal Learning in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, published on December 29, 2015, in eNeuro and authored by Zhihao Zhang, Avi Mendelsohn, Kirk F. Manson, Daniela Schiller, and Ifat Levy.

When you are hungry, the smell of a hearty meal is a cue for potential reward. The same smell, however, may not be perceived as much of a cue for reward at the end of a big meal because the meal has reduced the value of food. Other cues, such as the smell of coffee, may become reward-predictive instead. To allow such flexible updating of values, the brain needs to encode current value and inhibit value representations that are no longer valid.

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