Intrinsic reward

Grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), the purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of providing choices following competence frustration on one's intrinsic motivation in a follow-up task. Study 1 conducted a between-group EEG experiment with 50 participants and used a component of event-related potentials (ERPs) to represent intrinsic motivation. Study 2 was a behavioural experiment with 149 participants, adopting the self-report method to measure intrinsic motivation. The stimuli and procedure in Study 1 are identical to Study 2...

Introduction: Teaching methodologies promoting active learning result in higher-order knowledge application, a desirable outcome in health disciplines like Physiology. Flipped-classroom (FC) promotes active learning and engagement in the classroom. Although specialized research keeps accumulating, the advantages of FC for improving academic outcome and ultimately patient care remain controversial and open to further analysis. Objective: This study evaluates the benefits of applying FC to the Neurophysiology module of a Human Physiology course...

Images have been shown to consistently differ in terms of their memorability in healthy adults: some images stick in one's mind while others are forgotten quickly. Studies have suggested that memorability is an intrinsic, continuous property of a visual stimulus that can be both measured and manipulated. Memory literature suggests that important developmental changes occur throughout adolescence that have an impact on recognition memory, yet the effect that these changes have on image memorability has not yet been investigated...

Numerous studies of hippocampal synaptic function in learning and memory have established the functional significance of the scaffolding A-kinase anchoring protein 150 (AKAP150) in kinase and phosphatase regulation of synaptic receptor and ion channel trafficking/function and hence synaptic transmission/plasticity, and neuronal excitability. Emerging evidence also suggests that AKAP150 signaling may play a critical role in brain's processing of rewarding/aversive experiences. Here we focused on an unexplored role of AKAP150 in the lateral habenula (LHb), a diencephalic brain region that integrates and relays negative reward signals from forebrain striatal and limbic structures to midbrain monoaminergic centers...

BACKGROUND: The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is an important region in motivation and reward. Glutamatergic inputs from the infralimbic cortex (ILC) to the shell region of the NAc (NAcSh) have been implicated in driving the motivation to seek reward through repeated action-based behavior. While this has primarily been studied in males, observed sex differences in motivational circuitry and behavior suggest that females may be more sensitive to rewarding stimuli. These differences have been implicated for the observed vulnerability in women to substance use disorders...

Attentional biases toward threatening faces have repeatedly been studied in the context of social anxiety, with etiological theories suggesting exacerbated biases as a possible cause for the latter. To counteract these postulated effects, research has focused on the concept of attentional bias manipulation (ABM), in which spatial contingencies between succeeding stimuli are traditionally employed in training paradigms designed to deliberately shift automatic attention processes away from threat-related stimuli...

Much of what we know and love about music hinges on our ability to make successful predictions, which appears to be an intrinsically rewarding process. Yet the exact process by which learned predictions become pleasurable is unclear. Here we created novel melodies in an alternative scale different from any established musical culture to show how musical preference is generated de novo. Across nine studies ( n = 1,185), adult participants learned to like more frequently presented items that adhered to this rapidly learned structure, suggesting that exposure and prediction errors both affected self-report liking ratings...

Previous studies demonstrated that reward circuit plays an important role in smoking. The differences of functional and structural connectivity were found among several brain regions such as thalamus and frontal lobe. However, few studies focused on functional connectivity (FC) in whole-brain voxel level of young smokers. In this study, intrinsic connectivity contrast (ICC) was used to perform voxel-based whole-brain analyses in 55 young smokers and 55 matched non-smokers to identify brain regions with significant group differences...

Translational medicine (TM) is an interdisciplinary branch of biomedicine that bridges the gap from bench-to-bedside to improve global health. Fundamental TM skills include interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving (4Cs). TM is currently limited in undergraduate biomedical education programs, with little patient contact and opportunities for collaboration between different disciplines. In this study, we developed and evaluated a novel interdisciplinary challenge-based educational concept, grounded in the theoretical framework of experimental research-based education, to implement TM in undergraduate biomedicine and medicine programs...

This paper presents an exploratory study about the experiences of 25 inter-faith chaplains in five Canadian provinces. It utilizes a focus groups methodology. The goal of this qualitative research was to highlight the voices of the chaplains. Hence, the focus groups explored the unique and challenging experiences of chaplains' work in Canadian prisons. Data from all seven focus groups indicated that despite multiple challenges and obstacles, the correctional chaplains remain dedicated to their work and are committed to making a positive impact on their prisoners...

The practical application of Li-S batteries is still severely restricted by poor cyclic performance caused by the intrinsic polysulfides shuttle effect, which is even more severe under the high-temperature condition owing to the inevitable increase of polysulfides' solubility and diffusion rate. Herein, tungsten-doped vanadium dioxide (W-VO2 ) micro-flowers are employed with first-order metal-insulator phase transition (MIT) property as a robust and multifunctional modification layer to hamper the shuttle effect and simultaneously improve the thermotolerance of the common separator...

BACKGROUND: Pharmacists' and pharmacy technicians' stress and job turnover is at an all-time high. Both intrinsic motivations and extrinsic rewards play key roles in workplace satisfaction. Differences in workplace satisfaction have been identified when comparing chain pharmacies, independent pharmacies, and health systems work settings. OBJECTIVES: Cognitive evaluation theory was applied to explore the influence of intrinsic motivations and extrinsic rewards on both pharmacists' and pharmacy technicians' perceptions of motivations and rewards across various workplace settings...

Formulating expert policies as macro actions promises to alleviate the long-horizon issue via structured exploration and efficient credit assignment. However, traditional option-based multipolicy transfer methods suffer from inefficient exploration of macro action's length and insufficient exploitation of useful long-duration macro actions. In this article, a novel algorithm named enhanced action space (EASpace) is proposed, which formulates macro actions in an alternative form to accelerate the learning process using multiple available suboptimal expert policies...

Curiosity - the desire to seek information - is fundamental for learning and performance. Studies on curiosity have shown that people are intrinsically motivated to seek information even if it does not bring an immediate tangible benefit (i.e., non-instrumental information), but little is known as to whether people have the metacognitive capability to accurately monitor their motivation for seeking information. We examined whether people can accurately predict their own non-instrumental information-seeking behavior...

Enjoying music consistently engages key structures of the neural auditory and reward systems such as the right superior temporal gyrus (R STG) and ventral striatum (VS). Expectations seem to play a central role in this effect, as preferences reliably vary according to listeners' uncertainty about the musical future and surprise about the musical past. Accordingly, VS activity reflects the pleasure of musical surprise, and exhibits stronger correlations with R STG activity as pleasure grows. Yet the reward value of musical surprise - and thus the reason for these surprises engaging the reward system - remains an open question...

Navigating safely and efficiently in dense crowds remains a challenging problem for mobile robots. The interaction mechanisms involved in collision avoidance require robots to exhibit active and foresighted behaviors while understanding the crowd dynamics. Deep reinforcement learning methods have shown superior performance compared to model-based approaches. However, existing methods lack an intuitive and quantitative safety evaluation for agents, and they may potentially trap agents in local optima during training, hindering their ability to learn optimal strategies...

Although intrinsic motivation is often viewed as preferable to more extrinsic forms of motivation, there is evidence that the adaptiveness of these motivational states depends on the nature of the task being completed (e.g., Cerasoli et al., 2014). Specifically, research suggests task-motivation fit such that intrinsic motivation tends to benefit performance on open-ended tasks (tasks that involve qualitative performance assessment; e.g., creative writing) and extrinsic motivation benefits performance on closed-ended tasks (tasks that involve quantitative performance assessment; e...

Neuroimaging studies investigating the association between mental fatigue (henceforth fatigue) and brain physiology have identified many brain regions that may underly the cognitive changes induced by fatigue. These studies focused on the functional changes and functional connectivity of the brain relating to fatigue. The structural correlates of fatigue, however, have received little attention. To fill this gap, this study explored the associations of fatigue with cortical thickness of frontal and parietal regions...

The permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) stands as a classic conundrum within the realm of combinatorial optimization, serving as a prevalent organizational structure in authentic production settings. Given that conventional scheduling approaches fall short of effectively addressing the intricate and ever-shifting production landscape of PFSP, this study proposes an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning methodology with the objective of minimizing the maximum completion time. To tackle PFSP, we initially model it as a Markov decision process, delineating pertinent states, actions, and reward functions...

BACKGROUND: Emerging evidence supports the efficacy of mobile phone interventions for smoking cessation. However, behaviour changes of smokers who fail to reach abstinence and the related psychological mechanism are still understudied. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a behaviour change theory-based smoking cessation intervention delivered through personalised text messages from the perspective of smokers who fail to reach abstinence. METHODS: We conducted a two-arm, double-blind, randomised controlled trial, with the intervention group receiving personalised text messages developed specifically for this study, and the control group receiving non-personalised ones related to smoking cessation...