Dr. Montague’s research focuses on computational neuroscience: the connection between physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. His early theoretical work focused on the hypothesis that dopaminergic systems encode a particular kind of computational process, a reward prediction error signal, similar to those used in areas of artificial intelligence like optimal control. The Montague Lab uses theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to the problems of mental health and its derangement by disease and injury. They recently pioneered new approaches to measure sub-second fluctuations in dopamine and serotonin levels in the striatum of conscious human subjects.