From both a medical and educational perspective, there is enormous value to understanding the environmental factors that sculpt learning and decision making. These questions are often approached from proximate levels of analysis, but may be further informed by the adaptive developmental plasticity framework used in evolutionary biology. The basic adaptive developmental plasticity framework posits that biological sensitive periods evolved to use information from the environment to sculpt emerging phenotypes. Here, we lay out how we can apply this framework to learning and decision making in the mammalian brain and propose a working model in which dopamine neurons and their activity may serve to inform downstream circuits about environmental statistics. More widespread use of this evolutionary framework and its associated models can help inform and guide basic research and intervention science.

从医学和教育的角度来看，了解塑造学习和决策的环境因素具有巨大的价值。这些问题通常是从近似的分析水平来解决的，但可能会通过进化生物学中使用的适应性发育可塑性框架得到进一步的信息。基本的适应性发育可塑性框架假定生物敏感期进化为使用来自环境的信息来塑造新出现的表型。在这里，我们阐述了如何将这个框架应用于哺乳动物大脑的学习和决策，并提出一个工作模型，在该模型中，多巴胺神经元及其活动可以为下游回路提供环境统计信息。