Intrinsic reward

Economic incentives to promote health behavior change are highly efficacious for substance use disorders as well as increased medication adherence. Knowledge about participants' experiences with and perceptions of incentives is needed to understand their mechanisms of action and optimize future incentive-based interventions. The Drinkers' Intervention to Prevent Tuberculosis (DIPT) trial enrolled people with HIV (PWH) in Uganda with latent tuberculosis and unhealthy alcohol use in a 2x2 factorial trial that incentivized recent alcohol abstinence and isoniazid (INH) adherence on monthly urine testing while on INH preventive therapy...

Dopamine (DA) neurons of the substantia nigra (SN) and ventral tegmental area generally respond to aversive stimuli or the absence of expected rewards with transient inhibition of firing rates, which can be recapitulated with activation of the lateral habenula (LHb) and eliminated by lesioning the intermediating rostromedial tegmental nucleus (RMTg). However, a minority of DA neurons respond to aversive stimuli, such as foot shock, with a transient increase in firing rate, an outcome that rarely occurs with LHb stimulation...

Design of hardware based on biological principles of neuronal computation and plasticity in the brain is a leading approach to realizing energy- and sample-efficient AI and learning machines. An important factor in selection of the hardware building blocks is the identification of candidate materials with physical properties suitable to emulate the large dynamic ranges and varied timescales of neuronal signaling. Previous work has shown that the all-or-none spiking behavior of neurons can be mimicked by threshold switches utilizing material phase transitions...

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is a chronic neuropsychiatric condition that results from enduring cellular and molecular adaptations. Among substance use disorders, CUD is notable for its rising prevalence and the lack of approved pharmacotherapies. The nucleus accumbens (NAc), a region that is integral to the brain's reward circuitry, plays a crucial role in the initiation and continuation of maladaptive behaviors that are intrinsic to CUD. Leveraging advancements in neuroproteomics, we undertook a proteomic analysis that spanned membrane, cytosolic, nuclear, and chromatin compartments of the NAc in a mouse model...

In this editorial, we inspect the critical role of gender diversity within the domain of pathology and its consequential impact on research innovation and clinical outcomes. The editorial commences with a historical overview of gender disparities in pathology, acknowledging advancements toward gender parity while highlighting persistent impediments to full inclusivity. The discourse emphasizes the intrinsic value of integrating diverse gender perspectives in research, illustrating how such inclusivity catalyzes innovation, mitigates research biases, and elevates the standard of patient care through a more comprehensive understanding of the field of pathology...

INTRODUCTION: Inhalant abuse is an important health issue especially among children and adolescents who often encounter these agents in the home. Research into the neurobiological targets of inhalants has lagged behind that of other drugs such as alcohol and psychostimulants. However, studies from our lab and others have begun to reveal how inhalants such as the organic solvent toluene affect neurons in key addiction related areas of the brain including the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex...

BACKGROUND: The skills and attitudes of medical staff affect the quality of the healthcare system, hence the study of academic motivation and quality of life of medical students. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study involved 203 students of the Jagiellonian University Medical College. Academic motivation was assessed using the Academic Motivation Scale and quality of life using the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire. Academic Motivation Scale is based on the Self-Determination Theory, which distinguishes several dimensions of motivation arranged along self-determination continuum from amotivation, through extrinsic, controllable motivation, to intrinsic, autonomous motivation...

Self-relevance has been demonstrated to impair instrumental learning. Compared to unfamiliar symbols associated with a friend, analogous stimuli linked with the self are learned more slowly. What is not yet understood, however, is whether this effect extends beyond arbitrary stimuli to material with intrinsically meaningful properties. Take, for example, stimulus valence an established moderator of self-bias. Does the desirability of to-be-learned material influence self-learning? Here, in conjunction with computational modelling (i...

BACKGROUND: Oral health is a determinant of overall well-being and quality of life. Individual behaviors, such as oral hygiene and dietary habits, play a central role in oral health. Motivation is a crucial factor in promoting behavior change, and gamification offers a means to boost health-related knowledge and encourage positive health behaviors. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the impact of gamification and its mechanisms on oral health care of children and adolescents...

In real-world scenarios, making navigation decisions for autonomous driving involves a sequential set of steps. These judgments are made based on partial observations of the environment, while the underlying model of the environment remains unknown. A prevalent method for resolving such issues is reinforcement learning, in which the agent acquires knowledge through a succession of rewards in addition to fragmentary and noisy observations. This study introduces an algorithm named deep reinforcement learning navigation via decision transformer (DRLNDT) to address the challenge of enhancing the decision-making capabilities of autonomous vehicles operating in partially observable urban environments...

Future-oriented behavior is regarded as a cornerstone of human cognition. One key phenomenon through which future orientation can be studied is the delay of gratification, when consumption of an immediate reward is withstood to achieve a larger reward later. The delays used in animal delay of gratification paradigms are rather short to be considered relevant for studying human-like future orientation. Here, for the first time, we show that rhesus macaques exhibit human-relevant future orientation downregulating their operant food consumption in anticipation of a nutritionally equivalent but more palatable food with an unprecedentedly long delay of approximately 2...

BACKGROUND: The use of financial incentives and environmental change strategies to encourage health behaviour change is increasingly prevalent. However, the experiences of participants in incentive interventions are not well characterised. Examination of participant perceptions of financial incentives and environmental strategies can offer insights about how these interventions are facilitating or failing to encourage behaviour change. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to learn how participants in a randomised trial that tested financial incentives and environmental interventions to support weight loss perceived factors contributing to their success or failure in the trial...

The rise of new media technologies has reshaped the landscape of science communication. There is little research on scientists' outreach participation and its possible predictors in different media contexts. Based on a national survey of 8,533 scientists in China, this study examined multiple direct and personal norm-mediated predictors of scientists' intentions to participate in public outreach via legacy media versus social media. Our findings revealed two consistent direct predictors (past outreach participation and personal norms) and two inconsistent direct predictors (descriptive norms and intrinsic rewards) that are significant only for participating via social media in the Chinese context...

Creative or novel behaviors in bottlenose dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus ) can be indicators of flexible thinking and problem solving. Over 50 years ago, two rough-tooth dolphins demonstrated creative novel behaviors acquired through reinforcement training in human care. Since this novel training, a variety of species have been trained to respond to this conceptual cue. The current study assessed the creativity of 12 bottlenose dolphins (5 females, 7 males) housed at the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) in Roatan, Honduras...

Reinforcement learning (RL) is thought to underlie the acquisition of vocal skills like birdsong and speech, where sounding like one's "tutor" is rewarding. However, what RL strategy generates the rich sound inventories for song or speech? We find that the standard actor-critic model of birdsong learning fails to explain juvenile zebra finches' efficient learning of multiple syllables. However, when we replace a single actor with multiple independent actors that jointly maximize a common intrinsic reward, then birds' empirical learning trajectories are accurately reproduced...

BACKGROUND: Teacher identity is defined as a continuum of a person's self-conviction ('Identity is something I have') and a context-dependent action ('Identity is something I do in a context') (Lankveld et al. 2021). It has been identified a relevant contributor to physicians' teaching commitment. In this study, we further improve the currently only existing questionnaire instrument (37 items) measuring physicians' teacher identity. METHODS: Survey data on 147 clinicians at a German university hospital were (1) analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)...

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic further propelled the recent growth of telemedicine in low-resource countries, with new models of telemedicine emerging, including volunteer-based telemedicine networks. By leveraging existing infrastructure and resources to allocate health personnel more efficiently, these volunteer networks eased some of the pandemic burden placed on health systems. However, there is insufficient understanding of volunteer-based telemedicine models, especially on the human resources engagement on such networks...

The scaffolding A-kinase anchoring protein 150 (AKAP150) is critically involved in kinase and phosphatase regulation of synaptic transmission/plasticity, and neuronal excitability. Emerging evidence also suggests that AKAP150 signaling may play a key role in brain's processing of rewarding/aversive experiences, however its role in the lateral habenula (LHb, as an important brain reward circuitry) is completely unknown. Using whole cell patch clamp recordings in LHb of male wildtype and ΔPKA knockin mice (with deficiency in AKAP-anchoring of PKA), here we show that the genetic disruption of PKA anchoring to AKAP150 significantly reduces AMPA receptor-mediated glutamatergic transmission and prevents the induction of presynaptic endocannabinoid-mediated long-term depression in LHb neurons...

Environmental impacts of medicines arise throughout their entire life cycle. The pharmaceutical industry has a key role in reducing these impacts in early production phases, but currently has limited possibilities to reduce the environmental exposure arising from drug consumption and end-of-life. The aim of this interview study was to explore the current environmental actions within the industry, as well as the views and attitudes toward the strategies to address the environmental challenges and concerns. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among representatives (n=15) from twelve pharmaceutical companies operating in Finland in February-May 2021...

Investigations of information-seeking often highlight people's tendency to forgo financial reward in return for advance information about future outcomes. Most of these experiments use tasks in which reward contingencies are described to participants. The use of such descriptions leaves open the question of whether the opportunity to obtain such noninstrumental information influences people's ability to learn and represent the underlying reward structure of an experimental environment. In two experiments, participants completed a two-armed bandit task with monetary incentives where reward contingencies were learned via trial-by-trial experience...