COPENHAGEN, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Three Britain-based brain researchers have been awarded a Danish major prize, The Brain Prize, for explaining how learning is associated with the reward system of the brain, the organization behind the prize announced on Monday.
The prize-winners, English Peter Dayan, Irish Ray Dolan and German Wolfram Schultz, have identified how learning is linked with anticipation of reward, thus revealing the mechanisms in the brain that lead to compulsive gambling, drug addiction and alcoholism, according to a press release from the Lundbeck Foundation which established the prize in 2010 as a European prize.
Colin Blakemore, chairman of the foundation's selection committee, said the research of these three prize-winners offers far-reaching perspectives on the understanding of human behavior and how people make decisions.
"Their research has also provided a valuable key to understanding what goes wrong when people succumb to compulsive gambling, drug addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenia," Blakemore said. Through animal testing, mathematical modelling and human trials, the three prize-winners have proven that the release of dopamine is not a response to the actual reward but to the difference between the reward expected and the reward people actually receive, according to the foundation.
The one-million-euro Brain Prize was awarded for the first time in 2011. This year's prize will be presented on May 4 in Copenhagen.
