iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

First author Luke just joined Bluesky, you can find him @lpriestley.bsky.social

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

The work was inspired by a 2020 preprint from Akash Guru and @mrwarden.bsky.social, who were I think the first people to link dopamine ramps to cognitive maps. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

130

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

The ramps are reward prediction errors, but the error is between what the world-model knows about future reward, and values already stored in striatum. The model explains diverse experimental data, and has implications for the nature of model-based evaluation and its interaction with TD learning.

161

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Why does dopamine ramp up during approach to predictable rewards? In this preprint with Luke Priestley, we explore the idea that dopamine ramps occur when reward predictions inferred using a world-model are used to train striatal cached values.

biorxiv.org

Dopamine ramps as a normative consequence of dual-process control

Midbrain dopamine neurons are thought to implement a temporal difference (TD) reward prediction error (RPE) that updates cached values stored in striatum. This has been challenged by evidence that dop...

15219

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Michael's preprint outlines the rationale for developing the task, introduces methods for optimising the maze environments to discriminate navigation strategies, and for quantifying the strategies used, and demonstrates flexible route planning and very rapid learning of environment structure.

031

Thomas Akam @thomasakam.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Really happy to have this out. @peterdoohan.bsky.social did a fantastic job making sense of these rich and complex data and I think we learned some interesting new things about how frontal cortex contributes to flexible goal-directed behaviour.

040

Reposted by Thomas Akam

peterdoohan.bsky.social @peterdoohan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

411846