多巴胺信号表征奖赏预测误差的理论起源和进展

Theoretical origin and progress of the representation of reward prediction errors by dopamine signals

学会寻求自然奖赏对人和高等动物的生存和繁衍极为重要。脑内多巴胺能神经元活动在处理奖赏信息时发生具有表征意义的增强,产生多巴胺信号。人们相继提出快感、激励显著性、奖赏预测误差等一系列假说,日益精确地揭示了多巴胺信号所表征的意义内涵。这一进展历程对神经科学、心理学和人工智能研究具有深刻启迪,其成果更具有基础性的科学价值。本文简要回顾这些假说的发展历程,介绍奖赏预测误差假说如何继承多学科成果并相对准确地揭示多巴胺信号的重要功能,分析部分最新成果对奖赏预测误差假说的充实和扩展,并初步展望该领域进一步发展的可能方向。

The ability to seek natural rewards is crucial for the survival and reproduction of humans and higher animals.The activity of dopaminergic neurons in the brain undergoes significant enhancement during the processing of reward information,leading to the generation of dopamine signals.The hedonia,incentive salience,and reward prediction error hypothesis have successively been proposed,progressively revealing the significance and implications of dopamine signals.This progress has provided profound insights for neuroscience,psychology,and artificial intelligence research,and its achievements have fundamental scientific value.This article briefly reviews the development of these hypotheses,introduces how the reward prediction error hypothesis is powerful in explaining interdisciplinary findings and accurately revealing the important functions of dopamine signals,offers the latest findings that enriched and expanded this hypothesis,and provides a preliminary outlook on possible directions for further research.