Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning are fundamental processes helping organisms learn about stimuli that predict rewards in the environment actions lead to their obtainment. These two forms of learning interplay notably exert a strong impact on reward-seeking behaviors. Here, we examined humans whether along with effects cue-driven behaviors involving sexual modulated by reward relevance in...

To learn, obtain reward and survive, humans and other animals must monitor, approach and act on objects that are associated with variable or unknown rewards. However, the neuronal mechanisms that mediate behaviours aimed at uncertain objects are poorly understood. Here we demonstrate that a set of neurons in an internal-capsule bordering regions of the primate dorsal striatum, within the putame...

There are a substantial number of studies showing that the orbitofrontal cortex links events to reward values, whereas the hippocampus links events to the context in which they occur. Here we asked how the orbitofrontal cortex contributes to memory where context determines the reward values associated with events. After rats learned object-reward associations that differed depending on the spat...

Cognitive and emotional flexibility involve a coordinated interaction between working memory, attention, reward expectations, and the evaluation of rewards and punishers so that behaviour can be changed if necessary. We describe a model at the integrate-and-fire neuronal level of the synaptic and spiking mechanisms which can hold an expectation of a reward rule in working memory, and can revers...

Nervous systems must encode information about the identity of expected outcomes to make adaptive decisions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying identity-specific value signaling remain poorly understood. By manipulating the value and identity of appetizing food odors in a pattern-based imaging paradigm of human classical conditioning, we were able to identify dissociable predictive repres...

Restrained eaters do not eat less than their unrestrained counterparts. Proposed underlying mechanisms are that restrained eaters are more reward sensitive and that they have worse inhibitory control. Although fMRI studies assessed these mechanisms, it is unknown how brain anatomy relates to dietary restraint. Voxel-based morphometry was performed on anatomical scans from 155 normal-weight fema...

Food-storing birds demonstrate remarkable memory ability in recalling the locations of thousands of hidden food caches. Although this behaviour requires the hippocampus, its synaptic mechanisms are not understood. Here we show the effects of cannabinoid receptor (CB1-R) blockade on spatial memory in food-storing black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla). Intra-hippocampal infusions of the C...

We study the problem of selecting the best action from multiple candidates in a stochastic environment. In such a stochastic setting, when taking an action, a player receives a random reward and affords a random cost, which are drawn from two unknown distributions. We target at selecting the best action, the one with the maximum ratio of the expected reward to the expected cost, after exploring...

Optimal performance in two-alternative, free response decision-making tasks can be achieved by the drift-diffusion model of decision making--which can be implemented in a neural network--as long as the threshold parameter of that model can be adapted to different task conditions. Evidence exists that people seek to maximize reward in such tasks by modulating response thresholds. However, few mo...

We provide an empirical analysis of peer prediction mechanisms, which reward participants for information in settings when there is no ground truth against which to score reports. We simulate the mechanisms on a dataset of three million peer assessments from the edX MOOC platform. We evaluate different mechanisms on score variability, which is connected to fairness, risk aversion, and participa...