Upcoming Events
Roshan Cools
12:30pm-1:50pm, Friday, May 8th, 2026
Virtual Talk
https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96656211185
Dopamine and the adaptive tuning of behavioral strategy
The invigoration of goal-directed behavior requires cognitive effort. However, cognitive effort should be recruited in an environment-specific manner, so that it is tuned flexibly to the demands of the current environment. For example, effortful control is valuable only when the environment controllable, that is, when our actions matter. How does our brain know whether our actions matter? Given its role in reinforcement learning, the dopamine system is well positioned to regulate such environment-specific adaptive tuning of goal-directed behavior. In this talk, I will highlight an alternative route by which dopamine can adapt behavior to our environment. Specifically, I will review evidence from studies with model-informed pupillometry and neuroimaging that indicates that the brain computes the controllability of the environment by tracking its state-action-outcome transition structure independent of reinforcement rate. Moreover, preliminary results from work with people with Parkinson’s disease raise the hypothesis that this value-free inferential computation of controllability implicates dopamine. Thus dopamine might adaptively tune goal-directed behavior to our rapidly changing environment by boosting the inference of environmental controllability.
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