In a medical context, decision-making is associated with complicated assessment of gains, losses and uncertainty of outcomes. We here provide novel evidence about the brain mechanisms underlying decision-making of analgesic treatment. Thirty-six healthy participants were recruited and completed the Analgesic Decision-making Task (ADT), which quantified individual tendency of risk-taking (RPI), ...

The NCAA selects teams for their championship tournaments using a selection committee. For the Men’s Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament the committee must factor in the results of over 5,000 regular season games, as well as other qualitative factors. One of the key summary statistics used by the committee during the process is the Rating Percentage Index (RPI). This paper evaluates the commi...

Reinforcement learning is a kind of machine learning. Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a representative class of non-Markovian environments in reinforcemnet learning. We know the Rational Policy Making algorithm (RPM) to learn a deterministic rational policy in POMDPs. Though RPM can learn a policy very quickly, it needs numerous trials to improve the policy. Furthermore ...

Reference point indentation (RPI) was developed to measure material-level mechanical properties of bone in vivo. Studies using RPI in vivo have discriminated between human subjects with previous skeletal fractures and those without and among dogs given different anti-remodeling drugs. Recently, this technology was extended to rats, providing the first in vivo data for rodents. The goal of the p...

In vadose zone modeling, parameter es mates and model predic ons are inherently uncertain, regardless of quality and quan ty of data used in model-data fusion. Accurate quan fi ca on of the uncertainty is necessary to design future data collec on for improving the predic ve capability of models. This study is focused on evalua ng predic ve performance of two commonly used methods of uncertainty...

Social exclusion and risk-taking are both common experiences of concern in adolescence, yet little is known about how the two may be related at behavioral or neural levels. In this fMRI study, adolescents (N=27, 14 male, 14-17years-old) completed a series of tasks in the scanner assessing risky decision-making before and after an episode of social exclusion. In this particular context, exclusio...

There is debate regarding the integrity of semantic memory in dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). One view argues that DAT is associated with a breakdown in semantic memory; the other argues that DAT is associated with predominantly preserved semantic memory and a breakdown in retrieval. The classic release from proactive interference (RPI) paradigm was used to shed light on this debate. Indi...

Behavioral models of depression implicate decreased response-contingent positive reinforcement (RCPR) as critical toward the development and maintenance of depression (Lewinsohn, 1974). Given the absence of a psychometrically sound self-report measure of RCPR, the Reward Probability Index (RPI) was developed to measure access to environmental reward and to approximate actual RCPR. In Study 1 (n...

Potato is the world's fourth largest food crop yet it continues to endure late blight, a devastating disease caused by the Irish famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Breeding broad-spectrum disease resistance (R) genes into potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the best strategy for genetically managing late blight but current approaches are slow and inefficient. We used a repertoire of effector gen...