The dopamine system learns reward contingencies through a process known as reward contingent learning.

“in other words the dopamine system is very good at subconsciously parsing what are the things that happen between wanting and getting and that's part of the learning that dopamine achieves and indeed there are specialized circuits from the VTA and nucleus accumbens that are involved in just the learning of how we achieve or don't achieve specific types of rewards that we desire so this is called reward contingent learning because it's learning the contingencies of what led up to a reward or what didn't lead up to a reward”