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Over the last decade cognitive neuroscientists have revealed the basic mechanisms of both operant and pavlovian conditioning in the mammalian brain. The dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain have been shown to compute a reward prediction error almost exactly as predicted by the psychologists of the 1970s had supposed. These signals implement a precise value computation in which reinforcement gives rise to a stored synaptic representation of the precise value of stimuli and actions. More recently, neuroeconomists have shown how these values are stored, accessed, and compared when humans and animals choose amongst actions. These new insights have validated many of the core tenets to learning theory, while broadly extending our notion of the response to include more representational mechanisms than had been previously supposed.