Scientists from the Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition at the University of Arizona have found links to the learning behavior of humans and the genes associated with the neurotransmitter Dopamine.

So far, three genes have been pinpointed to affect the production of Dopamine in a person's brain. These genes defined the ability of an individual to learn from both positive and negative decisions they make.

Assistant professor of Psychology and the head of the research team behind the project Michael Frank noted:

When making these kinds of choices, you do not explicitly recall each individual positive and negative outcome of all of your previous such choices. Instead, you often go with your gut, which may involve a more implicit representation of the probability of rewarding outcomes based on past experience

The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex.

The model makes specific predictions on how subtle changes in different aspects of dopamine function can affect behavior, and one way to get at this question is to test individual genes