Earlier studies have demonstrated that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Although some studies have focused on real-life decision making in children with ADHD using the Iowa gambling task, the number of good deck choices, a frequently used index of decision-making ability in the gambling task, is insufficient for ...

The medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC)/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been proposed to signal the expected value of rewards when learning stimuli-rewards associations. Yet, it is still unclear whether identical or distinct orbitofrontal cortex regions encode expected rewards and punishments at the time of the cue during appetitive and aversive classical conditioning. Moreover, it is...

Under the current system of safety regulation in China, a lower level in the hierarchical system means more regulatory failure. The mechanism of rewards and punishments has been proven to compensate for regulatory failures according to game theory separately. This study analyzed rewards and punishments simultaneously to strengthen the regulatory power and offset the failure of regulation; examp...

The motivation of getting rewards or avoiding punishments reinforces learning behaviors. Although the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of rewards on episodic memory have been demonstrated, there is little evidence of the effect of punishments on this memory. Our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the effects of monetary rewards and punishments on activation d...

Comparative studies have implicated the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) in the anticipation of incentives, but the relative responsiveness of this neural substrate during anticipation of rewards versus punishments remains unclear. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated whether the anticipation of increasing monetary rewards and punishments would increase NAcc blood ...

How effective are rewards (for cooperation) and punishment (for noncooperation) as tools to promote cooperation in social dilemmas or situations when immediate self-interest and longer term collective interest conflict? What variables can promote the impact of these incentives? Although such questions have been examined, social and behavioral scientists provide different answers. To date, there...

Rewards and punishments (reinforcement) powerfully shape behavior. Accordingly, their neuronal representation is of significant interest, both for understanding normal brain-behavior relationships and the pathophysiology of disorders such as depression and addiction. A recent article by Vickery and colleagues (Neuron 72: 166-177, 2011) provides evidence that the neural response to rewards and p...

We report a framed field experiment, in which we study the effectiveness of punishment and reward in sustaining cooperation in a social dilemma. Punishments tend to be directed at non-cooperators and rewards are assigned by those who are relatively cooperative. In contrast to the results typically found in laboratory experiments, however, we find that punishments and rewards fail to increase co...