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SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE

Social subjective value in the primate midbrain

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How we value our own rewards depends on what others have. A new study shows that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex selectively monitor the value of rewards received by oneself or by another individual, whereas midbrain dopaminergic neurons integrate these values to generate social subjective reward values.

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Fig. 1: Neural response types encoding reward values for the self and others.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH110750). We thank A. Nair and S.S. Chang for helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Steve W. C. Chang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Dal Monte, O., Fan, S. & Chang, S.W.C. Social subjective value in the primate midbrain. Nat Neurosci 21, 1298–1299 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0230-1

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