In a seminal paper Lin and Reiter introduced the notion of progression for basic action theories in the situation calculus. The idea is to replace an initial database by a new set of sentences which reflect the changes due to an action. Unfortunately, progression requires secondorder logic in general. In this paper, we introduce the notion of strong progression, a slight variant of Lin and Reit...

A fundamental task in reasoning about action and change is projection, which refers to determining what holds after a number of actions have occurred. A powerful method for solving the projection problem is regression, which reduces reasoning about the future to reasoning about the initial state. In particular, regression has played an important role in the situation calculus and its epistemic ...

We define a notion of bounded action theory in the situation calculus, where the theory entails that in all situations, the number of ground fluent atoms is bounded by a constant. Such theories can still have an infinite domain and an infinite set of states. We argue that such theories are fairly common in applications, either because facts do not persist indefinitely or because one eventually ...

We propose a translation into Modal Logic of the ideas that formalise belief change in the Situation Calculus. This translation is extended to the case of revision. In the conclusion is presented a set of open issues.

Is the sense of fairness uniquely human? Human reactions to reward division are often studied by means of the ultimatum game, in which both partners need to agree on a distribution for both to receive rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions of the reward to their partner, a tendency our close primate relatives have thus far failed to show in experiments. Here we tested chimpanzees (Pa...

We consider a stochastic extension of the loop-free shortest path problem with adversarial rewards. In this episodic Markov decision problem an agent traverses through an acyclic graph with random transitions: at each step of an episode the agent chooses an action, receives some reward, and arrives at a random next state, where the reward and the distribution of the next state depend on the act...

In considering characteristics of action of anxiolytic drugs and the mechanism of drug action in the brain, it may be necessary to study not only the behavioral pharmacology but also the brain site. In the present study, anxiolytic drugs have been examined in various kinds of behaviors induced by stimulating the brain areas with regard to emotional expression such as reward (pleasure) or aversi...

Motivation and attention can have a profound influence on perception, learning and memory. Neuromodulatory systems, especially the noradrenergic (NE) system, co-vary with psychological states to modulate cortical arousal, influence sensory processing and promote synaptic plasticity. There is even some suggestion that the NE system might facilitate functional recovery after brain damage. Post-sy...

Motivation and attention can have a profound influence on perception, learning and memory. Neuromodulatory systems, especially the noradrenergic (NE) system, co-vary with psychological states to modulate cortical arousal, influence sensory processing and promote synaptic plasticity. There is even some suggestion that the NE system might facilitate functional recovery after brain damage. Post-sy...

We study the situation of a decision-maker who aims to encourage the players of an evolutionary game theoretic system to follow certain desired behaviours. To do so, she can interfere in the system to reward her preferred behavioural patterns. However, this action requires certain cost (e.g., resource consumption). Given this, her main goal is to maintain an efficient trade-off between achievin...