The importance of agency in human reward processing

Converging evidence suggests that reinforcement learning (RL) signals exist within the human brain and that they play a role in the modification of behaviour. According to RL theory, prediction errors are used to update values associated with actions and/or predictive cues, thus facilitate decision-making. For example, the reward positivity—a feedback-sensitive component of the event-related brain potential (ERP)—is thought to index an RL...