The standard reinforcement learning view of the involvement of neuromodulatory systems in instrumental conditioning includes a rather straightforward conception of motivation as prediction of sum future reward. Competition between actions is based on the motivating characteristics of their consequent states in this sense. Substantial, careful, experiments reviewed in Dickinson & Balleine, into the neurobiology and psychology of motivation shows that this view is incomplete. In many cases, animals are faced with the choice not between many different actions at a given state, but rather whether a single response is worth executing at all. Evidence suggests that the motivational process underlying this choice has different psychological and neural properties from that underlying action choice. We describe and model these motivational systems, and consider the way they interact.

Abstract—The primate amygdala is implicated in the control of behavioral responses to foods and in stimulus-reinforcement learning, but only its taste representation of oral stimuli has been investigated previously. Of 1416 macaque amygdala neurons recorded, 44 (3.1%) responded to oral stimuli. Of the 44 orally responsive neurons, 17 (39%) represent the viscosity of oral stimuli, tested using carboxymethyl-cellulose in the range 1–10,000 cP. Two neurons (5%) responded to fat in the mouth by encoding its texture (shown by the responses of these neurons to a range of fats, and also to non-fat oils such as silicone oil ((Si(CH 3) 2O) n) and mineral oil (pure hydrocarbon), but no or small responses to the cellulose viscosity series or to the fatty acids linoleic acid and lauric acid). Of the 44 neurons, three (7%) responded to gritty texture (produced by microspheres suspended in cellulose). Eighteen neurons (41%) responded to the temperature of liquid in the mouth. Some amygdala neurons responded to capsaicin, and some to fatty acids (but not to fats in the mouth). Some amygdala neurons respond to taste, texture and temperature unimodally, but others combine these inputs. These results provide fundamental evidence about the information channels used to represent the texture and flavor of food in a part of the brain important in appetitive responses to food and in learning associations to reinforcing oral stimuli, and are relevant to understanding the physiological and pathophysiological processes related to food intake, food selection, and the effects of variety of food texture in combination with taste and other inputs on food intake. © 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of IBRO. Key words: appetitive learning, Pavlovian conditioning, obesity, food intake, reward. The amygdala is implicated in emotion and motivation by lesion, single neuron recording, and neuroimaging investigations (Sanghera et al., 1979; Nishijo et al., 1988a; Davis,

We tested the hypothesis that the neural code of retinal ganglion cells is optimized to transmit visual information at minimal metabolic cost. Under a broad ensemble of light patterns, ganglion cell spike trains consisted of sparse, precise bursts of spikes. These bursts were viewed as independent neural symbols. The noise in each burst was measured via repeated presentation of the visual stimulus, and the energy cost was estimated from the total charge flow in a biophysically realistic model of ganglion cell spiking. Given these costs and noise, the theory of efficient codes predicts an optimal distribution of symbol usage. Symbols that are either noisy or metabolically costly are suppressed in this optimal code. We found excellent qualitative and quantitative agreement with the measured distribution of burst sizes for ganglion cells in the tiger salamander retina. ∗ Both authors contributed equally to this work. 1

Two questions are addressed in this paper: What can cognitive psychology bring to sensory evaluation? And what can cognitive psychology learn from sensory evaluation? In the first part, I will argue that one important contribution from psychology to sensory evaluation is to interpret flavor as a cognitively unified system made of three anatomically separated systems (smell, taste, and the trigeminal system). In the second part, I will argue that the applied field of sensory evaluation stresses the importance of using ecologically valid, naturalistic stimuli. Sensory evaluation also provides results that challenge accepted interpretations in psychology, especially in the field of evaluation of expertise.

■ Appetitive goal-directed behavior can be associated with a cue-triggered expectancy that it will lead to a particular reward, a process thought to depend on the OFC and basolateral amygdala complex. We developed a biologically informed neural network model of this system to investigate the separable and complementary roles of these areas as the main components of a flexible expectancy system. These areas of interest are part of a neural network with additional subcortical areas, including the central nucleus of amygdala, ventral (limbic) and dorsomedial (associative) striatum. Our simulations are consistent with the view that the amygdala maintains Pavlovian associations through incremental updating of synaptic strength and that the OFC supports flexibility by maintaining an activation-based working memory of the recent reward history. Our model provides a mechanistic explanation for electrophysiological evidence that cue-related firing in OFC neurons is nonselectively early after a contingency change and why this nonselective firing is critical for promoting plasticity in the amygdala. This ambiguous activation results from the simultaneous maintenance of recent outcomes and obsolete Pavlovian contingencies in working memory. Furthermore, at the beginning of reversal, the OFC is critical for supporting responses that are no longer inappropriate. This result is inconsistent with an exclusive inhibitory account of OFC function. ■

Human olfactory perception is notoriously unreliable, but shows substantial benefits from visual cues, sug-gesting important crossmodal integration between these primary sensory modalities. We used event-related fMRI to determine the underlying neural mech-anisms of olfactory-visual integration in the human brain. Subjects participated in an olfactory detection task, whereby odors and pictures were delivered sepa-rately or together. By manipulating the degree of se-mantic correspondence between odor-picture pairs, we show a perceptual olfactory facilitation for semantically congruent (versus incongruent) trials. This be-havioral advantage was associated with enhanced neural activity in anterior hippocampus and rostro-medial orbitofrontal cortex. We suggest these findings can be interpreted as indicating that human hippocampus mediates reactivation of crossmodal semantic associations, even in the absence of explicit mem-ory processing.

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www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual What can cognitive psychology and sensory evaluation learn from each other?

Neuronal activity in primate dorsolateral and orbital prefrontal cortex during performance of a reward preference task

of cocaine sensitization on dorsolateral and ventral striatum in the context of an Actor/Critic model