Differential magnitude coding of gains and omitted rewards in the ventral striatum.

Physiologic studies revealed that neurons in the dopaminergic midbrain of non-human primates encode reward prediction errors. It was furthermore shown that reward prediction errors are adaptively scaled with respect to the range of possible outcomes, enabling sensitive encoding for a large range of reward values. Congruently, neuroimaging studies in humans demonstrated that BOLD-responses in the ventral striatum encode reward prediction errors in similar fashion as dopaminergic midbrain neurons, suggesting that these BOLD-responses may be driven by dopaminergic midbrain activity.