Most researchers in machine learning have built their learning systems under the assumption that some external entity would do all the work of furnishing the learning experiences. Recently, however, investigators in several subbelds of machine learning have designed systems that play an active role in choosing the situations from which they will learn. Such activity is generally called explorat...

People with a self-control problem often seek relief through social interactions rather than binding commitments. Thus, in self-help groups like Alcoholic Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous etc., members are said to achieve better personal outcomes by mainly sharing their experiences. In other settings, however, peer influences can severely aggravate individual tendencies towards immediate gratific...

Recent research on online learning suggests that virtual worlds are becoming an important environment to observe the experience of flow. From these simulated spaces, researchers may gather a deeper understanding of cognition in the context of game-based learning. Csikszentmihalyi (1997) describes flow as a feeling of increased psychological immersion and energized focus, with outcomes that evok...

Flow is a subjective experience of high but effortless attention, enjoyment, and low self-awareness that can occur during the active performance of challenging tasks. The dispositional proneness to experience flow is associated with personality traits that are known to be influenced by dopaminergic neural systems. Here, for the first time, we investigated relations between flow proneness and do...