Competition between memories for reactivation as a mechanism for long-delay credit assignment

Animals learn about their surroundings and associate actions with their outcomes. Associative learning, facilitated by synaptic plasticity, enables the learning of individual events as well as the association of two events. In this dissertation, we explore how events are associated together when they are separated by a long delay. We propose reactivation as a possible mechanism through which two temporally separated events could be linked together. We also examine how credit is distributed when multiple actions could have contributed to the outcome.