Science News and Headlines

Neuroscientists Just Upended Our Understanding of Pavlovian Learning

Neuroscientists at UCSF discovered that the brain’s learning rate depends on the elapsed time between rewards rather than the number of cue‑reward pairings. Experiments with mice showed that longer intervals (up to 600 seconds) produced proportionally faster acquisition, resulting in equal total learning over a fixed period despite fewer trials. Real‑time dopamine recordings in the nucleus accumbens confirmed that neural reward signals obey the same time‑based rule. The results challenge century‑old conditioning theories and support a backward‑looking computational model.