Topic: future rewards

Mental fatigue alters behavior in diverse and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Could this be explained by the optimal allocation of limited cognitive resources? We consider that cognitive control allows to obtain more rewards from the environment, and that it gives rise to fatigue, which impedes future ability for the agent to gain rewards. Under those hypotheses, we formulated an optimal computational agent with a control allocation policy that maximizes future rewards, with two scenarios : limited resources that do not allow for more control exertion after a limit has been reached, or acc

We have revealed that there is a causal relationship between activation of dorsal raphe (DR) serotonergic neurons and patience when waiting for future rewards. To explain these behavioral data, we proposed a Bayesian decision model of waiting in which serotonin signals the prior probability of reward delivery. However, there is no direct evidence serotonin neural activity is modulated by reward probability. Five male serotonin neuron-specific GCaMP6-expressing mice were trained to perform a sequential tone-food waiting task that required them to wait for a delayed tone (tone delay: 0.3 s, tone