Striatal dopamine drives associative learning by acting as a teaching signal. Much work has focused on simple learning paradigms, including Pavlovian and instrumental learning. However, higher cognition requires that animals generate internal concepts of their environment, where sensory stimuli, actions and outcomes become flexibly associated. Here, we performed fiber photometry dopamine measurements across the striatum of male mice as they learned cue–action–outcome associations based on implicit and changing task rules. Reinforcement learning models of the behavioral and dopamine data showed that rule changes lead to adjustments of learned cue–action–outcome associations. After rule changes, mice discarded learned associations and reset outcome expectations. Cue- and outcome-triggered dopamine signals became uncoupled and dependent on the adopted behavioral strategy. As mice learned the new association, coupling between cue- and outcome-triggered dopamine signals and task performance re-emerged. Our results suggest that dopaminergic reward prediction errors reflect an agent’s perceived locus of control.

纹状体多巴胺通过充当教学信号来驱动联想学习。许多工作都集中在简单的学习范式上，包括巴甫洛夫学习和器乐学习。然而，更高的认知要求动物产生其环境的内部概念，其中感官刺激、行动和结果变得灵活相关。在这里，我们对雄性小鼠的纹状体进行了光纤光度法多巴胺测量，因为它们根据隐含的和不断变化的任务规则学习了线索-行动-结果关联。行为和多巴胺数据的强化学习模型表明，规则的变化会导致习得的线索-行动-结果关联的调整。规则改变后，小鼠放弃了习得的关联并重置了结果预期。提示和结果触发的多巴胺信号变得分离并依赖于所采用的行为策略。当小鼠了解到新的关联时，线索和结果触发的多巴胺信号与任务表现之间的耦合重新出现。我们的结果表明，多巴胺能奖励预测错误反映了代理人感知的控制点。