For those who have wondered why they like or dislike certain
things, or how they decide what to order from a menu, a team of
researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder says it's
dopamine. A CU-Boulder team studying Parkinson's disease
patients found strong evidence that dopamine in the brain plays
a key role in how people implicitly learn to make choices that
lead to good outcomes, while avoiding bad ones. The finding
could help researchers understand more about how the brain works
and could lead to a better understanding and treatment of brain
disorders like schizophrenia, according to CU-Boulder psychology
graduate student Michael Frank, who led the study. A paper on
the subject by Frank, CU-Boulder psychology Associate Professor
Randall O'Reilly and Lauren Seeberger of the Colorado
Neurological Institute's Movement Disorders Center appears in
the Nov. 5 issue of Science Express, an online version of
Science magazine. Often people will get a "gut feeling" that
allows them to make a choice dependin