Stimulus fading in the form of gradually increased exposure to a fear-evoking stimulus, often combined with differential reinforcement, has been used to treat phobias in children who are otherwise normal and in children with autism. In this investigation, we applied stimulus fading plus differential reinforcement with an adolescent with autism and diabetes whose needle phobia had prevented medi...

Signals during delays to reinforcement may lessen reductions in responding that typically occur when there is a delay between a response and its reinforcer. Sparse applied research has been devoted to understanding the conditions under which responding may be maintained when delays to reinforcement are introduced. We evaluated the extent to which providing signals during delay fading affected r...

An application of reinforcement learning to a differential game is presented. The reinforcement learning system uses a recently developed algorithm, the residual form of advantage learning. The game is a Markov decision process (MDP) with continuous states and nonlinear dynamics. The game consists of two players, a missile and a plane; the missile pursues the plane and the plane evades the miss...

An application of reinforcement learning to a linear-quadratic, differential game is presented. The reinforcement learning system uses a recently developed algorithm, the residual-gradient form of advantage updating. The game is a Markov decision process with continuous time, states, and actions, linear dynamics, and a quadratic cost function. The game consists of two players, a missile and a p...

The research reported here was designed to explore the relationship between aversive visual stimuli and human physiological activity in a clssical conditioning situation. Specifically, the questions asked were (1) whether homicide pictures were effective stimuli in the classical conditioning of heart rate and electrodermal activity and (2) if conditioning occurred, what would be the form of the...

An analytical method for predicting elastic–plastic stress distribution in a cylindrical pressure vessel has been presented. The vessel material was a ceramic/metal functionally graded material, i.e. a particle–reinforcement composite. It was assumed that the material’s plastic deformation follows an isotropic strain-hardening rule based on the von-Mises yield criterion, and that the vessel was...