In this research, the factors affectinguniversity employees’ motivation and productivity are identified and classified in seven groups; the impact of each motivation factor on the productivity is presented by ANP fuzzy model.Eight universities in Iran were analyzed in this research work. The aim of this study is to explore the productivity of employees. This paper attempts to give new insights ...

Since most animal species have been recognized as sentient beings, emotional state may be a good indicator of welfare in animals. The goal of this study was to manipulate the environment of nine beagle research dogs to highlight physiological responses indicative of different emotional experiences. Stimuli were selected to be a more or a less positive food (meatball or food pellet) or social re...

Cyber analysis is a complex task that requires the coordination of a large sociotechnical system of human analysts working together with technology. Adequate situation awareness of such a complex system requires more than aggregate situation awareness of individuals. Teamwork in the form of communication and information coordination is at the heart of team-level situation awareness. In this pos...

Conventional “hard” sensing in urban spaces is challenged by the complexity of the environment, creating gaps in situation assessment and possible confusion due to data association errors. Crowdsourced “soft” reports from human observers may remedy this problem but require techniques for fusing hard and soft data. This paper describes an experimental crowdsourcing system to evaluate the potenti...

This paper studies the notion of ability and its relation with the notion of action in a multi-agent context. It introduces the distinction between two notions respectively called “theoretical ability” and “ability”. The main contribution of this paper is a model of these notions in the Situation Calculus.

Cats placed in the situation of a choosing between a high-value time-delayed and a low-value immediate food rewards elected to wait for the preferred reward or to obtain the worse reward quickly. On the basis of the selected behavior strategy the cats were classified into three groups— self-control ones, choosing predominantly a delayed high-value food reward, impulsive, choosing predominantly ...

We previously reported that sympathetic activity was associated with exploration in decision-making indexed by entropy, which is a concept in information theory and indexes randomness of choices or the degree of deviation from sticking to recent experiences of gains and losses, and that activation of the anterior insula mediated this association. The current study aims to replicate and to expan...

How individuals make decisions has been a matter of long-standing debate among economists and researchers in the life sciences. In economics, subjects are viewed as optimal decision makers who maximize their overall reward income. This framework has been widely influential, but requires a complete knowledge of the reward contingencies associated with a given choice situation. Psychologists and ...

Using a comparative approach, we investigated the ability of dwarf goats and sheep to use direct and indirect information about the location of a food reward in an object-choice task. Subjects had to choose between two cups with only one covering a reward. Before making a choice, subjects received information about the baited (direct information) or non-baited cup (indirect information). Both g...

Hungry fruit flies can be trained by exposing them to two chemical odorants, one paired with the opportunity to feed on 1 M sucrose. On later testing, when given a choice between odorants the flies migrate specifically toward the sucrose-paired odor. This appetitively reinforced learning by the flies is similar in strength and character to previously demonstrated negatively reinforced learning,...