Motivated Reinforcement Learning

Competition between actions is based on the motivating characteristics of their consequent states in this sense. Substantial, careful, experiments reviewed in Dickinson & Balleine, 12,13 into the neurobiology and psychol(cid:173) ogy of motivation shows that this view is incomplete. In many cases, animals are faced with the choice not between many dif(cid:173) ferent actions at a given state, but rather whether a single re(cid:173) sponse is worth executing at all. Evidence suggests that the motivational process underlying this choice has different psy(cid:173) chological and neural properties from that underlying action choice. We describe and model these motivational systems, and consider the way they interact.