Sharif Digital Repository

Clinical and experimental observations show individual differences in the development of addiction. Increasing evidence supports the hypothesis that dopamine receptor availability in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) predisposes drug reinforcement. Here, modeling striatal-midbrain dopaminergic circuit, we propose a reinforcement learning model for addiction based on the actor-critic model of striatum. Modeling dopamine receptors in the NAc as modulators of learning rate for appetitive-but not aversive-stimuli in the critic-but not the actor-we define vulnerability to addiction as a relatively lower learning rate for the appetitive stimuli, compared to aversive stimuli, in the critic. We... 

Instrumental responses are hypothesized to be of two kinds: habitual and goal-directed, mediated by the sensorimotor and the associative cortico-basal ganglia circuits, respectively. The existence of the two heterogeneous associative learning mechanisms can be hypothesized to arise from the comparative advantages that they have at different stages of learning. In this paper, we assume that the goal-directed system is behaviourally flexible, but slow in choice selection. The habitual system, in contrast, is fast in responding, but inflexible in adapting its behavioural strategy to new conditions. Based on these assumptions and using the computational theory of reinforcement learning, we... 

In this study, we have used a single link system with a pair of muscles that are excited with alpha and gamma signals to achieve both point to point and oscillatory movements with variable amplitude and frequency. The system is highly nonlinear in all its physical and physiological attributes. The major physiological characteristics of this system are simultaneous activation of a pair of nonlinear musclelike- actuators for control purposes, existence of nonlinear spindle-like sensors and Golgi tendon organlike sensor, actions of gravity and external loading. Transmission delays are included in the afferent and efferent neural paths to account for a more accurate representation of the reflex...