That is, why have a "learning" reward type separate from wanting and liking? If the purpose of these terminal rewards is to tag memories for inclusion in the hippocampus then it would make sense to have a specific reward signal for when you manage to locally figure out a pattern so it can be stored.
The hippocampus doesn't just focus on associative relations but also premises memory on reward signals. This implies that a "learning" terminal reward is some kind of signal to the hippocampus, and I would imagine it's to mark where in-context learning happened. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21851992/
According to the Hebb rule, the change in the strength of a synapse depends only on the local interaction of presynaptic and postsynaptic events. Studies at many types of synapses indicate that the ea...