Description | Wolfram Schultz has been the most influential electrophysiologist working in the area of the reward and reinforcement in the last decade. He pioneered procedures for recording from single midbrain dopamine neurons in awake, behaving monkeys and discovered that dopamine activity, rather than being directly related to movement, is driven by rewards and reward predicting stimuli. Moreover, he has established that the profile of activity in a variety of behavioural paradigms demonstrates that the dopamine neurons encode not simply the occurrence of the reward but rather the prediction error generated by the reward. This important finding has had a major impact on contemporary theories of learning and reinforcement. His more recent work suggests that dopamine activity may also encode an aggregate signal of reward magnitude and probability, thereby providing a critical input into economic decision processes |