Basic affects reflect the diversity of satisfactions (potential rewards/reinforcements) and discomforts (punishments) that are inherited tools for living from our ancestral past. Affects are neurobiologically-ingrained potentials of the nervous system, which are triggered, moulded and refined by life experiences. Cognitive, information-processing approaches and computational metaphors cannot pe...

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”. Our co...

Comparative studies have implicated striatal and mesial forebrain circuitry in the generation of autonomic, endocrine, and behavioral responses for incentives. Using blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging, we sought to visualize functional activation of these regions in 12 normal volunteers as they anticipated and responded for monetary incentives. Both individual an...

The field of neuroscience includes a broad spectrum of activities, methods, and interests. Among other things, it investigates the very basic genetic contributions of phenotype, role of genes in health and disease, and how genetic factors help identify appropriate medications based on the body’s ability to metabolize these chemicals (pharmacokinetic profiles). Neuroscience extends beyond the mi...

AIMS The aim of the study was to explore the reasons for alcohol misuse and other risk-taking behaviours in adolescence. METHODS Narrative review. RESULTS Vulnerable adolescents make suboptimal addictive-related choices in the period of initiation of alcohol use and gambling, which is also a period of cognitive and brain development, and in health behaviours. Hyperactive response to rewards...

The Drosophila mushroom bodies are critical association areas whose role in olfactory associative learning has been well characterized. Recent behavioral studies using a taste association paradigm revealed that gustatory conditioning also requires the mushroom bodies (Masek and Scott, 2010; Keene and Masek, 2012). Here, we examine the representations of tastes and the neural sites for taste ass...

Choice behavior requires weighing multiple decision variables, such as utility, uncertainty, delay, or effort, that combine to define a subjective value for each considered option or course of action. This capacity is based on prior learning about potential rewards (and punishments) that result from prior actions. When made in a social context, decisions can involve strategic thinking about the...

Understanding how effort and luck map to observed success or failure can be very difficult. However, people often have to make important judgments about punishments and/or rewards from that vantage point. In an experimental context where this judgment should be very easy to make, we study how effectively principals can punish the low effort of agents while ignoring random information. The innov...

Approaching rewards and avoiding punishments could be considered as core principles governing behavior. Experiments from behavioral economics have shown that choices involving gains and losses follow different policy rules, suggesting that appetitive and aversive processes might rely on different brain systems. Here we contrast this hypothesis with recent neuroscience studies exploring the huma...

It is becoming increasingly appreciated that affective influences can contribute strongly to goal-oriented cognition and behavior. However, much work is still needed to properly characterize these influences and the mechanisms by which they contribute to cognitive processing. An important question concerns the nature of emotional manipulations (i.e., direct induction of affectively valenced sub...