Abstract

The ventral striatum (VS) is considered a key region that flexibly updates recent changes in reward values for habit learning. However, this update process may not serve to maintain learned habitual behaviours, which are insensitive to value changes. Here, using fMRI in humans and single-unit electrophysiology in macaque monkeys we report another role of the primate VS: that the value memory subserving habitual seeking is stably maintained in the VS. Days after object-value associative learning, human and monkey VS continue to show increased responses to previously rewarded objects...