Prediction about outcomes constitutes a basic mechanism underlying informed economic decision making. A stimulus constitutes a reward predictor when it provides more information about the reward than the environmental background. Reward prediction can be manipulated in two ways, by varying the reward paired with the stimulus, as done traditionally in neurophysiological studies, and by varying t...

Over the last decades, the endocannabinoid system has been implicated in a large variety of functions, including a crucial modulation of brain-reward circuits and the regulation of motivational processes. Importantly, behavioral studies have shown that cannabinoid compounds activate brain reward mechanisms and circuits in a similar manner to other drugs of abuse, such as nicotine, alcohol, coca...

This paper studies Value-at-Risk problems in finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with finite state space and two forms of reward function. Firstly we study the effect of reward function on two criteria in a short-horizon MDP. Secondly, for long-horizon MDPs, we estimate the total reward distribution in a finite-horizon Markov chain (MC) with the help of spectral theory and the centr...

Reward-related mesolimbic dopamine is thought to play an important role in guiding animal behaviour, biasing approach towards potentially beneficial environmental stimuli and away from objects unlikely to garner positive outcome. This is considered to result in part from an impact on perceptual and attentional processes: dopamine initiates a series of cognitive events that result in the priming...

Balancing behaviors that provide a reward NOW versus behaviors that provide an advantage LATER is critical for survival. We propose a model in which dopamine (DA) can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. At the same time, through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribu...