Causal evidence supporting the proposal that dopamine transients function as temporal difference prediction errors

Reward-evoked dopamine transients are well established as prediction errors. However, the central tenet of temporal difference accounts—that similar transients evoked by reward-predictive cues also function as errors—remains untested. In the present communication we addressed this by showing that optogenetically shunting dopamine activity at the start of a reward-predicting cue prevents second-order conditioning without affecting blocking. These results indicate that cue-evoked transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions. Maes et al. use second-order conditioning, blocking and optogenetic inhibition to show that cue-evoked dopamine transients function as temporal-difference prediction errors rather than reward predictions.