The theory of implementation abounds with mechanisms with intricate systems of rewards and punishments off-the-equilibrium path. Generally, it is not in the designer’s best interest to go through with the reward/punishment in the “subgame” arising from some disequilibrium play. This would make the mechanism’s outcome function non-credible. We define a notion of credible implementation and, in t...

Learning how to gain rewards (approach learning) and avoid punishments (avoidance learning) is fundamental for everyday life. While individual differences in approach and avoidance learning styles have been related to genetics and aging, the contribution of personality factors, such as traits, remains undetermined. Moreover, little is known about the computational mechanisms mediating differenc...

While expensive cryptographically verifiable computation aims at defeating malicious agents, many civil purposes of outsourced computation tolerate a weaker notion of security, i.e., " lazy-but-honest " contractors. Targeting this type of agents, we develop optimal contracts for outsourcing of computational tasks via appropriate use of rewards, punishments, auditing rate, and " redundancy ". Ou...

Serotonin is a neuromodulator that is extensively entangled in fundamental aspects of brain function and behavior. We present a computational view of its involvement in the control of appetitively and aversively motivated actions. We first describe a range of its effects in invertebrates, endowing specific structurally fixed networks with plasticity at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We t...

With the rapid development of knowledge economy, human resources have been one of the most important strategies of all walks of life. The role of performance appraisal of human resource management in the modern enterprise is becoming increasingly prominent, and has become the core issue of human resource management. There are two basic methods, qualitative and quantitative appraisal, in the emp...

How the brain uses success and failure to optimize future decisions is a long-standing question in neuroscience. One computational solution involves updating the values of context-action associations in proportion to a reward prediction error. Previous evidence suggests that such computations are expressed in the striatum and, as they are cognitively impenetrable, represent an unconscious learn...

The present paper focuses on third-parties’ decisions to punish and reward in social dilemmas, and on the moderating role of environmental uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty about the size of the common resource). We argue and demonstrate that in social dilemmas third-parties use the equality rule as a strict benchmark to determine punishments (Study 1) as well as rewards (Study 2), but only under ...

This paper describes the development of a brain computer interface. The system allows the user to control a game character in a 3D virtual environment, as well as control a basic ‘Pong like’ bar in a simple 2D application. The user will have to adapt their thought patterns to be consistent, and to be able to successfully control the game. As the user moves through the game, various methods of b...

Dopaminergic neurons are thought to drive learning by signaling changes in the expectations of salient events, such as rewards or punishments. Olfactory conditioning in Drosophila requires direct dopamine action on intrinsic mushroom body neurons, the likely storage sites of olfactory memories. Neither the cellular sources of the conditioning dopamine nor its precise postsynaptic targets are kn...

The capacity of humans and other animals to provide appropriate responses to stimuli anticipating motivationally significant events is exemplified by instrumental conditioning. Interestingly, in humans instrumental conditioning can occur also for subliminal outcome-predicting stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether attention is necessary for subliminal instrumental conditioning to take pla...