This Week in The Journal.

This Week in The Journal of Neuroscience, two articles explore different aspects of reward-based decision-making and the role of dopamine in reinforcement learning. The first article by Stoll and Rudebeck investigates the contributions of different subregions of the ventral frontal cortex (VFC) in reward-based decision-making in male macaque monkeys. They found that the activation of these subregions varied during the decision-making task, with some subregions representing decision-related variables and others closely related to reward or flavors of juices. The second article by Taira et al. focuses on the role of dopamine in reward-based learning and how it targets distinct circuits. They used a unique "backward conditioning" task in rats and discovered that dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core increased in response to the reward and decreased in response to the neutral cue, reflecting general excitatory learning. These studies contribute to our understanding of the VFC's role in decision-making and the different functions of dopamine circuits in reinforcement learning, which may have implications for the treatment of conditions such as addiction. [Extracted from the article]