Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Learning and conditioning — how organisms learn from contingencies and consequences — Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning, reinforcement and reward learning in brains, habit and goal-directed control, behaviour analysis and relational responding. Not machine learning, which is learning-theory or the anthology (ADR-025).
11 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-170 | When no single setting of a regulator is stable in every environment it may meet, must any system that comes to keep its essential variables within limits carry a channel from those variables to the parameters of its regulation, whether or not it adapts by trial and error? | Filed when the promotion audit (batch 032, ADR-047 v2) narrowed and promoted THEORY-324. Ashby’s necessity was re-derived for systems that follow the trial-and-error rule, where it is close to definitional. The former promote_when asked it of any system that comes to keep its essential variables within limits, which is wider. This question holds that wider form. | Open |
| QUESTION-307 | In dialectical behaviour therapy, do skills-homework completion and phone coaching predict falling urges and less frequent target behaviour once baseline functioning and motivation are controlled and patients with missing diary data are kept, and does skill use between sessions mediate the change? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-922, moved here when the tenth status review promoted THEORY-922, whose title claims only the correlations in one programme’s selected sample, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the associations replicate, and what carries them, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-311 | Do synaptic eligibility traces on the scale of seconds carry learning from delayed outcomes in behaving animals, so that interfering with the trace between action and outcome abolishes learning from the delayed outcome but not from immediate ones? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-909, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-909 to the delay windows Gerstner et al. review, mostly from slices, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether such traces carry learning in behaving animals is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-313 | When a habit is modelled as a prior over policies that grows by counting, do the counts fitted to an animal’s or a person’s own choice history predict when behaviour becomes insensitive to devaluation, and when it still switches at once? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-923, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-923 to what one simulated task, run once per condition, showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The model makes the pattern; whether animals or people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-325 | Is persistent avoidance in anxiety maintained by an inflated uncertainty estimate about the avoided states, as Brown, Price and Dombrovski propose, or by a pessimistic evaluation of one’s own future avoidance, as Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw propose, rather than by an inflated threat value? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-910 and THEORY-915, moved here together when the thirteenth status review promoted both, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. They are the two belief-maintained rivals CLAIM-446’s test must hold fixed. | Open |
| QUESTION-327 | Does available avoidance leave threat expectancy uncorrected in proportion to how few unavoided disconfirming trials it allows, in people with anxiety disorders as in healthy controls, and does performing and then losing an unsignalled avoidance response raise threat expectancy for a stimulus never paired with harm, scaling with how much the person avoided? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-901 and THEORY-920, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to what Mancinelli and Bach’s review reports and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask what avoidance does to threat expectancy, outside the signalled, healthy-volunteer paradigms the review covers. | Open |
| QUESTION-328 | Does an implemented model-based or latent-cause model of human avoidance, compared on the same data with the model-free two-factor implementations, reproduce the phenomena Mancinelli and Bach rate A or B, including residual avoidance after signalled outcome omission, and does a model without an inferential component fail them? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-900, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-900, whose title claims only the systematic review’s verdict, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether a fitted inferential model wins is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-329 | In people with fear-based anxiety disorders against controls, does a systematic search with meta-analysis, or a large preregistered study, find that what differs is the adjustment of learning rate to the kind of uncertainty, noise against volatility, mainly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation do not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-897, moved here when the thirteenth status review narrowed THEORY-897 to Brown, Price and Dombrovski’s reading of seven studies and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern holds in a systematic synthesis is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-330 | How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-907 and THEORY-917, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to Chou, Wilson and Smith’s review and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask whether the review’s patterns hold with facets, tasks and confounds separated. | Open |
| QUESTION-331 | In a second, preferably pre-registered sample with a cost attached to avoiding, do anxiety-disorder patients again avoid a safety cue more than controls but danger cues no more, keep a higher threat expectancy after effective avoidance, and report more relief at omissions, with rated aversiveness matched or controlled? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-912, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-912, whose title claims only what one cross-sectional study measured (ADR-047’s one-study ruling), as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern replicates is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-333 | Does how far fear falls within or across exposure or extinction sessions predict fear at follow-up once initial fear is controlled, in the studies Craske et al. 2014 cite or a later meta-analysis, and in well-powered clinical samples? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-921, moved here when the fourteenth status review narrowed THEORY-921 to what Craske et al.’s review reports and promoted it, as THEORY-920’s moved to QUESTION-327. The review reports the finding from six cited studies, mostly of analog samples; whether the primary studies and clinical samples bear it out is this question. | Open |