Pigeons really like millet seed, monkeys crave juice, and humans get a kick out of winning money. While all animals don’t enjoy the same rewards, Paul Glimcher has discovered some common features in the way animal brains learn to recognize and pursue something of value. Glimcher is one of the founding fathers of the young field of neuroeconomics, in which economic theories help inform investigations of brain function. It’s not surprising then, that his approaches include game theory as well as measuring the firing of single neurons. Glimcher’s talk details his research from the past 15 years, what he describes as an attempt to “add something” to the classic studies on the basal ganglia circuit conducted by fellow symposium speaker Okihide Hikosaka. From Hikosaka’s data and other research, Glimcher came to believe that neurons of the substantia nigra (part of the basal ganglia) were coding for something of worth to an animal, but that these neurons were “responding not to reward per se, but to deviations to expectation.” For instance, if a pigeon expected a delivery of millet seed following a conditioned cue, no neurons fired, but if the reward was delayed, then suddenly delivered, the pigeon would find its initial prediction in error, and its neurons burst into action. Various models emerged to capture the ways in which these neurons, energized primarily by the neurotransmitter dopamine, enabled animals to adjust expectations about and predict rewards. But Glimcher found fault with others scientists’ “conditional parameters.” He says, “As an economist, this is frustrating.” So he developed three mathematical axioms for testing the so-called Reward Prediction Error (RPE) models. His work “suggested a way of unifying the data,” with the notion that the basal ganglia learns “the values of actions in a quantitative way from the dopamine neurons and the incoming stimulus.” Glimcher hypothesized that dopamine neurons take the value of a reward just received, “and su...