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).
38 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-044 v2 | In relational frame theory the self is verbal behaviour’s content, its process and its context, and the self as context is a perspective learned from deictic relations that cannot itself be found as content | Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) define three selves: the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself; the knowing self, their ongoing process; and the transcendent self, their context. Hayes et al. (LIT-555) say the third arises from deictic frames (I–you, here–there, now–then) as “a sense of self as a locus or perspective”, and is “a context for verbal knowing, not the content”, so its limits “cannot be consciously known”. The account maps the three onto the record’s holdings: the content is the narrative self (Dennett, Gallagher, Strawson), and the context is what Hume could not find among his perceptions and what Metzinger calls a transparent perspective. It differs from the minimal self (Gallagher) on origin: RFT says the perspective is learned in language. The evidence for the learned origin is cited, not read, so Proposed. The clinical claim is THEORY-051. | Proposed |
| THEORY-046 v2 | Expected tangible rewards for merely engaging in an interesting task lower later free-choice engagement with it | Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999, LIT-557): across 55 experiments, expected tangible rewards given for working on an interesting task lowered free-choice engagement after the reward stopped (d = −0.40; children −0.43, college students −0.21), and lowered self-reported interest less (−0.15). By their study-by-study account, Cameron and Pierce’s rival analysis found the same for this contingency (performance-independent rewards, −0.29), while disputing nearly everything else. Their 2001 reply (LIT-562), read here, re-codes 145 studies and finds it again: rewards offered for doing an interesting task lowered free choice, −0.35 across 57 studies. Active: both sides of the dispute find this effect. | Active |
| THEORY-049 v2 | Whether an external event lowers or raises intrinsic motivation depends on whether it is experienced as controlling or as information about competence | Cognitive evaluation theory, as tested by Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999, LIT-557) and summarized by Ryan and Deci (LIT-559) and Deci and Ryan (LIT-558): rewards, feedback, deadlines and choice affect intrinsic motivation through their “functional significance”. Controlling events shift the perceived locus of causality outward and undermine it; informational ones affirm competence and enhance it, but only with a sense of autonomy. The meta-analytic pattern fits, and controlling versus informational positive feedback differ by d = −0.78 in four studies. Mediation by felt control is untested for rewards. Its rival, Cameron, Banko and Pierce’s account (LIT-562), finds rewards tied to a score or to beating others do not undermine. Neither side has tested mediation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-050 | Psychological inflexibility, in which verbal relations give private events aversive functions and make experiential avoidance a general strategy, is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Hayes et al. (LIT-555) model psychopathology as inflexibility: cognitive fusion supports experiential avoidance, which narrows behaviour. Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) give the mechanism: once a word stands in derived relation to an event it can carry that event’s aversive functions, so private events become worth avoiding. Kashdan and Rottenberg (LIT-553) find inflexibility across depression and anxiety in cognitive, behavioural and physiological systems, and say its causal role is unknown. The evidence is correlational, small, mostly self-report and mostly from the model’s authors, and the meta-analysis that would test it (LIT-543) is unread, so Proposed. It is compatible with the loop account of disorder, not a rival to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-062 | Model-based and model-free predictions both operate in instrumental and in Pavlovian learning, and which one controls behaviour follows their relative reliability, not the preference of a supervising system | Daw, Niv & Dayan (LIT-580) cast habitual and goal-directed instrumental control as model-free caching and model-based search, and let behaviour follow whichever estimate is less uncertain; simulations reproduce the effects of over-training, task complexity and reward proximity on devaluation. Dayan & Berridge (LIT-584) show from instant revaluation of a salt cue that Pavlovian prediction also has a model-based form, and suggest the same reliability arbitration there. Both controllers pursue the same ends; neither is the irrational one. The instrumental half is qualitative simulation; the Pavlovian half of the arbitration is a suggestion. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-154 | Whether an expected tangible reward lowers or raises later intrinsic motivation depends on how tightly its stated contingency ties it to performance and success | Cameron, Banko and Pierce (2001, LIT-562), re-analysing 145 studies with contingencies coded by procedure. On interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards undermine later free choice when loosely tied to performance (for doing the task, for “doing well”) or earned at less than the maximum; they do not when given for surpassing a score, and they enhance it when given for exceeding others. Read through social cognitive and behavioural theory: rewards tied to success carry competence. Proposed: the paper measures no mediator and pools control groups that differ in feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-307 | Adaptation by trial and error in a large system finishes in a practicable time only if partial adaptations are retained, and retention requires that the system not be fully joined: parts must be separated, at least temporarily, by constancies, and where later learning shares parts with earlier learning it destroys it | Ashby (1952; 2nd ed. 1960), LIT-787, read in NOTE-851, Chs. 10–16. If all successes must occur at once, trials grow as (1/p)ᴺ; if each is kept once found, roughly as N/p. Keeping one needs no channel from what is still changing to what is already right, so a fully joined system, the Homeostat included, cannot accumulate; constancies cut a system into independent parts. Exact for the type-cases; the fit to brains is qualitative. | Proposed |
| THEORY-324 v2 | A system adapts by trial and error to an environment whose effect on its essential variables it does not know only if a second feedback, through those variables, changes the parameters of its primary feedback; and if that feedback changes them whenever, and for as long as, an essential variable is outside its limits, every equilibrium the whole can reach is an adapted one | Ashby (1952; 2nd ed. 1960), LIT-787, read in NOTE-851. Necessity is deduced from the trial-and-error rule against a Black Box environment; sufficiency from the theorem that a whole is at equilibrium only where every part is. The Homeostat shows it in a four-unit linear machine. The parameter changes are blind, and the account says nothing about how long the search takes, which is the subject of THEORY-307. | Active |
| THEORY-484 | The brain implements hierarchical reinforcement learning with options: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex represents which option is active, dorsolateral striatum holds option-specific policies, orbitofrontal cortex holds option-specific values, and dopamine carries option-level prediction errors at subtask boundaries | Botvinick, Niv and Barto (2009), LIT-581, read in NOTE-451. Four proposed extensions of the actor-critic mapping, each matched to existing correlational findings, and predictions the authors say “call for further experimental scrutiny”. The evidence for prefrontal coding of subtask segments is “only indirect”. The mapping assumes pseudo-reward; other frameworks (HAM, MAXQ) would predict differently. | Proposed |
| THEORY-489 | Chains of human function learners, each trained on the previous learner’s responses, forget their starting function and in 28 of 32 families converge within a few generations to a positive linear function, the bias earlier studies report, whatever function trained the first learner; this is convergence to the learners’ favoured function, not shown to be convergence to their prior | Kalish, Griffiths & Lewandowsky (2007), LIT-820, read in NOTE-616. 288 participants in 32 nine-generation chains, four starting conditions. 28 families converged to a positive linear function; 3 converged to the negative linear one and 1 had not converged. The bias was taken from earlier studies, not measured on these learners, and stationarity was not established. It supports the claim that human transmission chains settle on what learners favour in this task, not that they reach the Bayesian prior, and it cannot tell sampling learners from MAP learners. | Active |
| THEORY-688 | In an actor-critic learner that can choose temporally extended options as well as primitive actions, options that fit the task speed learning, while options with ill-placed subgoals slow it, and options that fit an earlier layout keep the agent from finding a newly opened shortcut, so hierarchy helps only with the right subroutines | Botvinick, Niv and Barto (2009), LIT-581, read in NOTE-451. Toy simulations in a rooms domain with pre-trained options. Doorway options sped learning; window options slowed it; with a shortcut opened, primitive-only agents found the shortest path on 75% of runs while doorway-option agents never used it (mean 11.79 against 9.73 steps). It is a result about the model. That people or brains work this way is the separate, proposed account THEORY-484. | Active |
| THEORY-895 v2 | Incentive sensitization: repeated drug exposure can make the mesolimbic ‘wanting’ system lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, so that cue-triggered incentive salience grows, persists for years and even increases during abstinence, while ‘liking’ need not rise and may fall; sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose the person’s cognitive desire, and incentive salience can run without any reportable change in feeling | Berridge and Robinson (2016), LIT-1461, read in NOTE-1109 from the PMC author manuscript. A review by the theory’s authors. Strong in rats and moderate in people for drugs; weak for behavioural addictions, where the authors call the evidence emerging and the mechanism unknown. Filed separately from THEORY-893, which holds the liking–wanting dissociation, because what QUESTION-267 and CLAIM-433 need is the sensitization result: a ranking whose strength is re-keyed to cues, cut loose from both pleasure and the person’s goals, and lasting. | Proposed |
| THEORY-897 v2 | In Brown, Price and Dombrovski’s reading of seven computational learning studies they selected without a systematic search, with mixed directions, anxiety goes with altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation show little relation to it | Brown, Price & Dombrovski (2023; preprint 2022), LIT-1479, read in full from the NIH author manuscript in NOTE-1120. Their Table 2 and the synthesis drawn from it: under volatility anxious people adjust learning too little except after very surprising outcomes, and under noise they learn too fast, an effect the authors call less consistent. A narrative review of seven studies, not a meta-analysis; the reading that anxiety cannot tell noise from change is the authors’. | Active |
| THEORY-900 v2 | A systematic review of 116 studies of avoidance learning in healthy humans finds the evidence contradicting two-factor and other associative theories and favouring expectancy and inference-based accounts, but also finding residual avoidance after the outcome is visibly removed, which a purely inferential account does not predict | Mancinelli & Bach (preprint 2025; NBR 2026), LIT-1477, read in full in NOTE-1134. A PRISMA review without meta-analysis, searched to December 2024, of studies with shock or noise in healthy volunteers. The verdict is the authors’ scoring of five theories against phenomena they rate for robustness; no model was fitted. They argue current paradigms are too simple to expose where inference gives way to Pavlovian control. | Active |
| THEORY-901 v2 | As Mancinelli and Bach’s systematic review of avoidance learning in healthy humans reports it, rating both A, an avoidance response left available during extinction persists, in some participants for hundreds of unpunished trials, and keeps expectancy of the aversive outcome higher than in people denied it (nine studies); and less effective or costlier responses extinguish faster (six studies, one exception) | Mancinelli & Bach (preprint 2025; NBR 2026), LIT-1477, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1134. Rated A (“protection from extinction”, 9 studies; “less efficient or more effortful AR imply less protection from extinction”, 6 studies) in a systematic review of 116 studies. Healthy volunteers, shock or noise. The authors’ explanation, that effective avoidance leaves fewer chances to detect a change, is marked “putatively”. | Active |
| THEORY-907 v2 | As Chou, Wilson and Smith review them, in about six foraging studies, mostly sub-clinical, higher stress or anxiety went with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for (Trier et al. 2023), people higher in trait somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction the study’s further analyses associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator | Chou, Wilson & Smith (preprint June 2024; NBR 2024), LIT-1483, read in full in NOTE-1127. Foraging: Lenow et al. 2017, Bustamante et al. 2023, Lloyd et al. 2022a and 2022b, with human open-field and plus-maze studies agreeing. Checking: Trier et al. 2023, a single study. Mostly sub-clinical; stress and anxiety are treated together; the mechanisms are the authors’ readings. | Active |
| THEORY-909 v2 | As reviewed by Gerstner et al. (2018) from five papers, mostly in slices and one laboratory per region, pairing pre- and postsynaptic activity changed the synapse when a neuromodulator or plateau potential followed within about 1 s in striatum, within 5 s (noradrenaline, LTP after pre-before-post pairing) or 2.5 s (serotonin, LTD after post-before-pre pairing) in visual and prefrontal cortex, and within about 2 s in CA1, and not at longer delays; the reviewers read this as a decaying synaptic eligibility trace and as experimental support for three-factor learning rules on behavioural time scales | Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018), LIT-1494, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1130. A review of five experimental papers, 2014–2017 (Yagishita; He; Brzosko 2015 and 2017; Bittner), not new data. Mostly slices, one laboratory per region; the minute-scale CA1 result may be consolidation. The reviewers grant that other mechanisms could bridge the same gap. | Active |
| THEORY-910 v2 | Brown, Price and Dombrovski propose, without a model run or data, that in aversive environments avoiding uncertain states keeps their uncertainty high and so perpetuates avoidance, that anxiety strengthens this loop by misreading noise as change, and that exposure works by reducing the uncertainty rather than an excess of learned threat | Brown, Price & Dombrovski (2023; preprint 2022), LIT-1479, read in full in NOTE-1120. A framework stated in words and schematic figures: the loop is avoidance, unreduced uncertainty, more avoidance. It runs through an uncertainty estimate, a belief, with no authority or control variable. For fear-based disorders; by the authors’ statement it does not explain exposure in GAD. | Active |
| THEORY-912 v2 | In a picture-based avoidance task, treatment-seeking patients with OCD or PTSD avoided a safety cue more than healthy controls and, after effective avoidance, still expected the aversive picture more; patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia or PTSD reported more relief when it was omitted; the groups did not differ in avoiding the danger cues | De Kleine et al. (2023), LIT-1490, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1123. 47 controls against 33 OCD, 40 PDA and 66 PTSD patients, cross-sectional, before exposure treatment. Relief was already higher in patients before avoidance was available, and patients rated the pictures as more aversive. It does not show the authors’ account, that low confidence in avoidance makes omissions surprising and the relief reinforces avoidance. | Active |
| THEORY-914 v2 | In fear conditioning, extinction does not erase the original threat association but adds a competing inhibitory one, which is why extinguished fear can return with time, a change of context, an unsignalled aversive event or renewed pairing | Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek & Vervliet (2014), LIT-1500, read in full from the PMC author manuscript in NOTE-1137. The paper summarizes Bouton’s model and the four return-of-fear phenomena that support it, and translates them into exposure practice. The evidence is cited, not reported: the source is a clinical translation, and a promotion needs the primary literature. It does not show that exposure therapy in patients works by inhibitory learning alone. The authors allow that habituation also plays a part. | Proposed |
| THEORY-915 v2 | In Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw’s simulations of a Markov decision process, an agent that evaluates actions as if it will fail to avoid danger at later steps, while in fact choosing optimally at each step, spreads threat value to states far from the danger and avoids early and widely, which reproduces qualitatively exaggerated threat appraisal, fear generalization and several laboratory findings associated with anxiety | Zorowitz, Momennejad & Daw (2020; preprint 2019), LIT-1496, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1136. A decision-theoretic argument and value-iteration simulations with a β-pessimistic Bellman equation. The misbelief is about the agent’s own future control; the danger is represented correctly. No data are fitted. That learned values outlast correction of the misbelief is argued in the paper, not simulated, and is not part of this title. | Active |
| THEORY-917 v2 | Chou, Wilson and Smith read about eight computational studies of exploration in reward-based bandit tasks, mostly in sub-clinical samples, with mixed results and none replicated, as suggesting that directed exploration rises with trait or cognitive anxiety and falls with state or somatic anxiety; none they review links random exploration to anxiety | Chou, Wilson & Smith (preprint June 2024; NBR 2024), LIT-1483, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1127. A narrative review; the pattern is the authors’ reading of about eight studies with different tasks, models and anxiety measures, with one failed replication and one null. The authors hedge it with “may” and “many results could be seen to suggest”. | Active |
| THEORY-920 v2 | As Mancinelli and Bach’s systematic review reports it, rating it B, in three laboratory studies of healthy humans a signalled, costless avoidance response offered for a stimulus never paired with the aversive outcome was used, and withdrawing it raised expectancy of the outcome for that stimulus, though Xia et al. (2019) found no change in skin conductance or startle; every study signalled the response’s availability, which may itself have read as a danger cue | Mancinelli & Bach (preprint 2025; NBR 2026), LIT-1477, read in full in NOTE-1134. Rated B (“AR execution can propagate to CS-”, 3 studies: Cameron et al. 2022, Engelhard et al. 2015, Xia et al. 2019). The authors infer that people deduce danger without experiencing it, perhaps counterfactually, from having avoided; they also say the signal that avoidance is available may itself be read as a danger cue. | Active |
| THEORY-921 v2 | As Craske et al.’s 2014 review reports it, citing six studies and reporting no data of its own, how far fear falls during an extinction or exposure session, or across sessions, does not predict how much fear is expressed at follow-up, in animals, human laboratory samples and fearful, mostly analog, human samples | Craske et al. (2014), LIT-1500, read in full from the PMC author manuscript in NOTE-1137, citing six studies. The authors read it as “divergence in response systems”: fear expressed during exposure and the learning that exposure produces need not change together. That is the basis of their case against habituation-based exposure. The paper reports no data, and the cited studies are mostly analog samples. | Active |
| THEORY-922 v2 | Among 56 of 88 patients in one DBT intensive outpatient programme, kept because they finished a four-month cycle and gave enough diary data, skills-homework completion in months 1–3 correlated with larger falls in suicide and substance-use urges (r ≈ .35) and phone-coaching frequency with a larger fall in self-harm urges (r = .31); neither correlated with change in how often the behaviours occurred, and only homework separated patients with and without a target behaviour in month 4 | Edwards, Kober, Rinne, Griffin, Axelrod & Cooney (2021), LIT-1480, read in full in NOTE-1121. A chart and diary-card review: three of eight urge-change correlations with the two predictors significant, none with behaviour frequency; month-4 abstinence from all target behaviours went with more homework (91% against 80%, p = .02), not significantly with more coaching (p = .096). No correction for multiple comparisons, selected sample, no measure of skill use. | Active |
| THEORY-923 v2 | In one simulated T-maze task with hand-set parameters, run once per condition, an active inference agent’s habit, learned by counting its own state transitions and policy choices, emerged from goal-directed behaviour, and once acquired it persisted, and reinforced itself, after the reward was devalued, while an agent devalued before acquisition switched at once | Friston, FitzGerald, Rigoli, Schwartenbeck, O’Doherty & Pezzulo (2016), LIT-1476, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1138. One simulated T-maze task. The habit is one more policy scored by posterior probability; its prior and transitions grow by count, not by reward. It shows persistence under devaluation, a cached mapping failing when what is appropriate changes; it does not show amortization, and its reaction times are simulation run times. | Active |
| THEORY-934 | Under Bush–Mosteller learning with negative payoffs, the continuous-time limit is a replicator term in benefits plus a probability-matching term, which alone drives choice probabilities to success probabilities | Börgers & Sarin (JET 1997; working paper 1993), LIT-1505, read in full in NOTE-1149. When reinforcements may be negative, probability removed from a punished strategy is redistributed, and the limit is dp_j/dt = p_j(Ū_j* − p|Ũ|q) + Ū_j*(σ_j* − p_j). With payoffs of equal absolute size only the matching term remains. The limit is stated with its proof omitted. | Proposed |
| THEORY-938 | Cross learning has the expected motion of the replicator dynamic and follows it on any finite horizon in the continuous-time limit, but for every learning speed the discrete process converges with probability one to a pure strategy profile, even in games where the replicator dynamic cycles | Börgers & Sarin (JET 1997; working paper 1993), LIT-1505, read in full from the 1995 working paper in NOTE-1149. Two players running Cross’s rule with payoffs in (0, 1): expected change equals the discrete replicator step (Proposition 3); the slow-learning limit is the Taylor replicator dynamic at each finite time (Proposition 4); for every step size the process is absorbed in a pure profile with probability one (Proposition 5). The equivalence is pointwise in time, not uniform. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1178 | In slices of striatum, visual and prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, Hebbian co-activation leaves a synaptic eligibility trace, lasting about 1 s in striatum, 3 to 10 s in cortex and about 2 s in CA1, that a later neuromodulator or plateau potential converts into a weight change and whose sign it can set: experimental support for three-factor learning rules on behavioural time scales | The wide form THEORY-909 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-909, Active, is its evidence. Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018), LIT-1494, read five experimental papers as a decaying eligibility trace whose conversion, and direction, a third factor sets, and as support for three-factor rules on behavioural time scales; the evidence is mostly slices, one laboratory per region, and the reviewers grant that other mechanisms could bridge the gap. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1180 | In foraging tasks, higher stress or anxiety goes consistently with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for, people higher in somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator | The wide form THEORY-907 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-907, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1182 | Across seven computational learning studies selected without a systematic search, anxiety goes with altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation show little relation to it | The wide form THEORY-897 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-897, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1184 | In three laboratory studies of healthy humans, offering a costless avoidance response for a stimulus never paired with the aversive outcome led people to use it, and withdrawing the response then raised their expectancy of the outcome for that stimulus; signalling of the response is a confound | The wide form THEORY-920 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-920, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s clause “though not their skin conductance or startle in the one study that measured them” is not kept: it read more into the review than it says, and THEORY-920’s note of 2026-10-30 says why. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1186 | Across computational studies of exploration in reward-based bandit tasks, mostly in sub-clinical samples and not yet replicated, directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and to fall with state or somatic anxiety | The wide form THEORY-917 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-917, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s last clause, that random exploration shows no relation to anxiety, is not kept: the review reports only that no study links them, and THEORY-917’s note of 2026-10-30 says why. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1189 | In laboratory avoidance learning in healthy humans, an avoidance response that remains available during extinction persists, in some participants for hundreds of unpunished trials, and keeps expectancy of the aversive outcome higher than in people denied it; the more effective and the cheaper the response, the slower it extinguishes | The wide form THEORY-901 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-901, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1190 | In a Markov decision process, an agent that evaluates actions as if it will fail to avoid danger at later steps, while in fact choosing optimally at each step, spreads threat value to states far from the danger and avoids early and widely, which reproduces qualitatively exaggerated threat appraisal, fear generalization and several laboratory findings associated with anxiety | The wide form THEORY-915 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-915, Active, is its evidence. Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw (2020), LIT-1496, state it of Markov decision processes in general and show it in the environments they simulate. The inherited promote_when asks for data in people, which the paper leaves to future work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1191 | In a simulated active inference agent, a habit learned by counting the agent’s own state transitions and policy choices emerges from goal-directed behaviour, and once acquired it persists, and reinforces itself, after the reward is devalued, while an agent devalued before acquisition switches at once | The wide form THEORY-923 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-923, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1193 | How far fear falls during an extinction or exposure session, or across sessions, does not predict how much fear is expressed at follow-up, in animals, human laboratory samples and fearful human samples | The wide form THEORY-921 held before the fourteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-921, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1324 | In Ryan, Mims and Koestner’s experiment, the same expected reward for doing well left less later free-choice engagement when given with controlling feedback than with informational feedback, and in both styles less than no reward with the same feedback: the interpersonal style of a performance-contingent reward changes its effect, and the reward lowers intrinsic motivation even when the information it carries is held fixed | Ryan, Mims and Koestner (1983), LIT-1970, read in NOTE-1522 from the scan on the SDT site. One experiment, N = 96, n = 16 per cell, ANCOVA on initial interest. The framing effect is F(1, 89) = 4.25 and the reward effect against feedback-matched controls F(1, 89) = 4.34; recomputed from the cell means without the covariate, about 4.9 and 3.4 (p ≈ .07). Felt pressure was higher under controlling conditions; mediation was not tested. Proposed for replication and mediation. | Proposed |