Timing in reward and decision processes

Timing in reward and decision processes.

Sensitivity to time, including the time of reward, guides the behaviour of all organisms. Recent research suggests that all major reward structures of the brain process the time of reward occurrence, including midbrain dopamine neurons, striatum, frontal cortex and amygdala. Neuronal reward responses in dopamine neurons, striatum and frontal cortex show temporal discounting of reward value. The...

Markov Decision Processes with Arbitrary Reward Processes

We consider a learning problem where the decision maker interacts with a standard Markov decision process, with the exception that the reward functions vary arbitrarily over time. We show that, against every possible realization of the reward process, the agent can perform as well—in hindsight—as every stationary policy. This generalizes the classical no-regret result for repeated games. Specif...

Asymptotic Behavior of Multivariate Reward Processes with Nonlinear Reward Functions

COVARIANCE MATRIX OF MULTIVARIATE REWARD PROCESSES WITH NONLINEAR REWARD FUNCTIONS

Multivariate reward processes with reward functions of constant rates, defined on a semi-Markov process, first were studied by Masuda and Sumita, 1991. Reward processes with nonlinear reward functions were introduced in Soltani, 1996. In this work we study a multivariate process , , where are reward processes with nonlinear reward functions respectively. The Laplace transform of the covar...

Decision processes in models of timing.

The article discusses the role played by decision mechanisms in the leading model of timing, scalar expectancy theory. Examples of the roles played by decision mechanisms in explanations of behaviour on temporal generalization and bisection are presented. Decision mechanisms for different timing tasks often have a common form (thresholded normalized difference, TND), where differences between d...