Topic: Human participants

Perceptual decisions are ubiquitous and essential in life, and even in their simplest forms open a window into the neural mechanisms underlying cognition. However, the properties of decision mechanisms inferred in simple behavioral paradigms are not independent of the properties of employed stimuli and task. One key task property is the type of information provided by a single stimulus, which can be either stationary or dynamic. Stationary paradigms are based on evidence with fixed central tendency, often obscured by noise, whereas in dynamic paradigms the mean of the evidence can vary within

Exploration is an essential part of learning, and the question of how to achieve efficient exploration has been extensively studied in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent works have demonstrated -- both in theory and in practice -- the importance and effectiveness of sophisticated methods of exploration which are sensitive to the long-term exploratory consequences of actions, and to the global structures of the environment. This is analogous to the standard concept of value in RL. How "good" an action is depends not only on the immediate reward gained by taking it, but also on the