Nature Communications · 8 October 2026 · From issue 48
Reward function compression facilitates goal-dependent reinforcement learning
Learning speeds up when people can simplify many goals into one simple rule.
Gaia Molinaro, Anne G. E. Collins.
People learn faster when their goals can be boiled down to a simple rule. In six experiments, people learned worse when they had many different goals to juggle. They learned better when those goals followed one simple pattern. Faster mental processing of rewards also matched better learning, and computer models linked this speed to more accurate choices.
This describes a pattern seen across six behavioral experiments, not a brain mechanism directly observed.
Six lab experiments on humans, mechanism not directly confirmed yet.
Integrity screen: passed (3 checks) Checked 8 October 2026. Retraction record: none. DOI resolves at doi.org. Metadata record found (Nature Communications). Read the source
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