Punishment

…it considers implications for blame, punishment and forgiveness without reducing moral behaviour to individual genes.

Humans and other animals approach reward and avoid punishment and pay attention to cues predicting these events. Such motivated behavior thus appears to be guided by value, which directs behavior towards or away from positively or negatively valenced outcomes. Moreover, it is facilitated by (top-down) salience, which enhances attention to behaviorally relevant learned cues predicting the occurrence of valenced outcomes. Using human neuroimaging, we recently separated value (ventral striatum, posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex) from salience (anterior ventromedial cortex, occipital cortex

…punish unfair proposers, even when the punishment is personally costly. How vigorously do they move in punishing unfair offers? Is vigor proportional to the incurred self-cost? Or does it rather reflect the cost inflicted on the unfair other? Here, we combined experimental economics and kinematics to address these questions. In study 1, we used motion

…dilemma, which typically collapses punishment and reward into a single scalar signal, whereby early losses can be overcome by later gains. However, th

Animals learn when punishment or reward is predicted by neutral stimuli like tones or odors. Synaptic plasticity maps the predictor to the appropriate behavioral drive, forming a memory trace. But if the predictor is presented as one of two options, the optimal response is uncertain and depends on the alternative. Can a single memory trace evoke different behaviors, depending on stimulus context? We used optogenetics in Drosophila to form an odor-punishment association restricted to a single set of synapses, ie. a single memory trace. These flies showed flexible behavioral responses to a given

Drosophila can learn to associate odours with reward or punishment and the resulting memories direct odour-specific approach or avoidance behaviours. Recent progress has revealed a straightforward model for learning in which reinforcing dopaminergic neurons assign valence to odour representations in the neural ensemble of the mushroom bodies. Dopamine directed synaptic depression alters the route of odour-driven activity through the mushroom body output network. This circuit configuration and influence of internal state guide the expression of appropriate behaviour. Importantly, learned behavi