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Associative learning is a fundamental concept in behavioral psychology, wherein a connection is established between two stimuli or events, leading to a learned response. This process is critical in understanding how behaviors are acquired and modified. Conditioning, the mechanism through which associations are formed, can be divided into two main types: classical conditioning and operant conditioning, each elucidating different aspects of associative learning.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 28, 2026

Pavlovian Conditioned Approach Training in Rats

Pavlovian Conditioned Approach Training in Rats

Published on: February 4, 2016

Decoding the formation of reward predictions across learning.

Thorsten Kahnt¹, Jakob Heinzle, Soyoung Q Park

¹Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, D-10115 Berlin, Germany. thorsten.kahnt@bccn-berlin.de

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|October 14, 2011

Summary

Brain regions learn to represent predicted rewards similarly to actual outcomes through experience. These reward representations in the striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) are crucial for guiding value-based decisions.

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Last Updated: May 28, 2026

Pavlovian Conditioned Approach Training in Rats

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Published on: February 4, 2016

Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans

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Published on: March 19, 2014

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Decision Science

Background:

Predicted rewards guide behavior, with prior studies locating these in prefrontal and striatal areas.
Neural representations of predicted rewards mirror those of actual outcomes, but their learning dynamics and decision-making links remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the emergence of predicted reward representations during learning.
To explore the relationship between these representations and value-based decision-making.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with multivariate pattern classification.
A Pavlovian conditioning procedure where human subjects learned novel cue-outcome associations during scanning.

Main Results:

Activity patterns in the orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and dorsal striatum increasingly resembled those of actual reward outcomes as learning progressed.
Reward representations emerged earlier in the striatum than in prefrontal regions.
DLPFC representations were specifically linked to subsequent value-based choices.

Conclusions:

Brain regions encode outcome predictions by activating neural patterns similar to actual outcomes.
Reward predictions in the DLPFC are directly involved in value-based decision-making.