We describe an audio granular synthesis generator with controllers that can be accessed by reinforcement learning agents. The movement of the controllers affects the sound, which is analyzed to produce a vallue called the reinforcement. The analysis is based on spectral goals and the reinforcement value is used to adjust the agents. Experiments are described using spectral features that are the...

Snmmary.--Operant reinforcement procedures were employed by a teacher and a teacher's aide in the classroom to develop simple but sustained social behaviors in 8 young severely retarded children. The relative effectiveness of social and edible reinforcement was also investigated as well as the tendency for these new behaviors to generalize from a group to a free-play situation. Reinforcement pr...

The current study tests the utility of the contextual view of reinforcement in predicting substance use among a sample of 34 psychiatric outpatients enrolled at a public psychiatric facility. Participants reported substance use, as well as the frequency and enjoyability of a variety of potential reinforcers, for the previous 30 days. A series of regression analyses revealed that a ratio of rein...

In 5 experiments using delay conditioning of magazine approach with rats, reinforcement rate was varied either by manipulating the mean interval between onset of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) or by manipulating the proportion of CS presentations that ended with the US (trial-based reinforcement rate). Both manipulations influenced the acquisition of responding. I...

To behave adaptively, we must learn from the consequences of our actions. Doing so is difficult when the consequences of an action follow a delay. This introduces the problem of temporal credit assignment. When feedback follows a sequence of decisions, how should the individual assign credit to the intermediate actions that comprise the sequence? Research in reinforcement learning provides 2 ge...

The original reinforcement learning scheme comprises two networks, one performs a controller and the other stands for an evaluator. Based on temporal difference predictive techniques, the evaluative network predicts an external reinforcement signal and estimates a more informative internal signal to adapt a set of parameters of the controller. This paper introduces a modified reinforcement lear...

BACKGROUND Stand-alone laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) has been found to be effective in producing weight loss but few large, one-center LSG series have been reported. Gastric leakage from the staple line is a life-threatening complication of LSG, but there is controversy about whether buttressing the staple line with a reinforcement material will reduce leaks. We describe a single-center...