Feedback is highly contingent on behavior if it eventually becomes easy to predict, and weakly contingent on behavior if it remains difficult or impossible to predict even after learning is complete. Many studies have demonstrated that humans and nonhuman animals are highly sensitive to feedback contingency, but no known studies have examined how feedback contingency affects category learning, ...

Real time database systems associate the concept of deadlines with transaction executions Previous ap proaches use best e ort techniques to schedule a given set of transactions to meet the deadlines as well as to ensure the consistency of the database However such approaches are inadequate for target applications which have hard real time deadlines that need to be met in the event of crisis sit...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in the valence of a stimulus that results from pairing the stimulus with an affective stimulus. Two high-powered studies (total N = 1161) investigated the nature of the relationship between EC and contingency awareness measured as contingency memory. Stronger EC occurred among people with more accurate and more confident memory of the pairings. Awareness...

This paper demonstrates that quality-contingent pricing is a useful mechanism for mitigating the negative effects of quality uncertainty in e-commerce and IT services. A contingency pricing contract specifies a sequence of possible quality levels and corresponding prices. The market estimates the firms performance at various quality levels based on historical statistics, and the firm may have a...

The concept of alternative stable states has long been a dominant framework for studying the influence of historical contingency in community assembly. This concept focuses on stable states, yet many real communities are kept in a transient state by disturbance, and the utility of predictions for stable states in explaining transient states remains unclear. Using a simple model of plant communi...

Expectancy value theory holds that goal-directed behavior is a function of (a) expectations—the belief that performance depends on effort, (b) instrumentality—the belief that outcome depends on performance, and (c) outcome value—the value attached to achieving the outcome. The present research provides a direct test of two factors involved in the instrumentality component: the contingency betwe...