Adaptive value coding and choice behavior

Adaptation describes how neural representations and related behaviors change as a function of past experience in order to better align encoding and action to the environment. Adaptation is a fundamental feature of perception and sensory processing, and recent results suggest similar principles govern the evaluation and decision-making process. These history-dependent changes are evident in motivational, valuation, and choice behaviors and accompanied by adaptive changes in value coding across the brain, notably the midbrain dopaminergic area and frontal brain regions. These changes are sensitive to multiple statistics of the prior reward distribution, pointing towards possible computational goals, biological constraints, and implications of adaptive value coding.