An assortment of human behaviors is thought to be driven by rewards including reinforcement learning, novelty processing, learning, decision making, economic choice, incentive motivation, and addiction. In each case the ventral tegmental area/ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens) (VTA-VS) system has been implicated as a key structure by functional imaging studies, mostly on the basis of standard...

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is implicated in many basic human functions and behaviours and is closely associated with happiness, depression and reward processing. In particular it appears to be involved in suppressing responses to distracting stimuli while waiting for a delayed reward. Here we present a system level model of the limbic system which is able to generate a serotonin (5-hy...

Previous reports have described that neural activities in midbrain dopamine areas are sensitive to unexpected reward delivery and omission. These activities are correlated with reward prediction error in reinforcement learning models, the difference between predicted reward values and the obtained reward outcome. These findings suggest that the reward prediction error signal in the brain update...

due to the importance of employee engagement in the last decade and the significant role which plays in concept of organizational efficiency, identifying the factors influencing this concept can help any organization to grow and improve and also maintain and guarantee the survival of organizations in today’s competitive conditions. one of the factors influencing this concept is organizational r...

Outsourcing system development to international information technology vendors working in project teams can notably facilitate the successful implementation of client information system development (ISD) projects. Reward structures in such culturally different environments, however, are not well defined or understood. The authors examined the effects of team performance based reward structures ...

The mesolimbic dopamine system comprises neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) andsubstantia nigra (SN), projecting to the ventral striatum. This system was originally described to mediate pleasure and goal-directed movement associated with rewarding stimuli. However, it is now clear that dopamine, although crucial for reward processing, drives not the hedonic experience of reward (“likin...

Distal reward refers to a class of problems where reward is temporally distal from actions that lead to reward. The difficulty for any biological neural system is that the neural activations that caused an agent to achieve reward may no longer be present when the reward is experienced. Therefore in addition to the usual reward assignment problem, there is the additional complexity of rewarding ...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is neurobehavioral disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity and impaired reward system function, such as delay aversion and low reward sensitivity. The pharmacological treatment for ADHD includes methylphenidate (MPH), or osmotic release oral system-MPH (OROS-MPH), which increases extrasynaptic dopamine and noradrenaline le...

Human behaviour is generally guided by the anticipation of potential outcomes that are considered to be rewarding. Reward processing can thus be dissected into a phase of reward anticipation and a phase of reward consumption. A number of brain structures have been suggested to be involved in reward processing. However, it is unclear whether anticipation and consumption are mediated by the same ...

We present and solve a real-world problem of learning to drive a bicycle. We solve the problem by online reinforcement learning using the Sarsa( )-algorithm. Then we solve the composite problem of learning to balance a bicycle and then drive to a goal. In our approach the reinforcement function is independent of the task the agent tries to learn to solve.