Reply to de Fleurian et al.: Toward a fuller understanding of reward prediction errors and their role in musical pleasure

We are pleased that our manuscript on the neural processes underlying musical pleasure and reward (1) has elicited commentary from de Fleurian et al. (2). Their first comment regards the distinction between reward prediction errors (RPEs), which concern predicted values like rewards/punishments, and sensory prediction errors, which concern predicted events in general (3). Whereas music aesthetic research often focuses on the latter (4), our findings indicate that value-based predictive processing also contributes to musical pleasure, in line with other recent data implicating the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in musical surprises (5). How sensory predictions might engage valuation processes is a pressing question in cognitive neuroscience, arising from evidence of … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: benjamin.gold{at}mail.mcgill.ca. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1