Environmental uncertainty

…malicious information and ordinary environmental uncertainty. Communication signals provide physical evidence of trustworthiness that is difficult to forge; the cy-trust framework turns that evidence into probabilistic trust estimates and weights neighboring agents accordingly. For consensus and distributed optimization, the analysis establishes almost-sure convergence with bounded departures from nominal performance even when malicious agents form a majority of a node’s neighbors, exceeding the classical Byzantine threshold.

Mounting evidence suggests that the prefrontal cortex encodes environmental uncertainty for value-based decision-making. However, how uncertainty influences goal-seeking at the neural level remains elusive. We used human fMRI data collected with a two-stage Markov decision task to investigate the neural embeddings of goal and uncertainty during reinforcement learning (RL). We found that the neural activity patterns of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) encode the immediate goals and the environmental uncertainty levels, compared with other brain areas involved