New paper on dopamine, RL, and cognitive effort

We are delighted to announce a new paper: Striatal dopamine can enhance both fast working memory, and slow reinforcement learning, while reducing implicit effort cost sensitivity out in Nature Communications from a collaboration with Dr. Roshan Cools at the Donders Institute and Dr. Michael Frank at Brown University.

We report on a study of how individual differences in striatal dopamine synthesis capacity, crossed with methylphenidate (DA reuptake inhibitor) and sulpriride (D2 antagonist) shape the degree to which we rely on incremental RL-like learning versus fast and flexible working memory during an instrumental learning task. We show that DA promotes reliance on working memory, in part by reducing the implicit effort cost experienced while performing demanding tasks.