Beyond lottery-evoked ambiguity aversion: The neural signature of the types and the sources of uncertainty.

Studies on decision-making under uncertainty have mainly focused on understanding preferences for either risk or ambiguity using standard lottery designs. However, people often face uncertainty that directly stems from interacting with other people, which may be processed differently from lottery-based uncertainty. Here, we substantially extend the investigation of uncertainty by examining a fourfold pattern of the sources and the types of uncertainty, assessing behavioral and neural responses to both risk and ambiguity across both social and non-social contexts. A key element in our research design was to control for participants' naturally occurring social beliefs, and taking these a priori beliefs into account allow us to elicit individual preferences in accordance with economic approaches that stress the dynamics of ambiguity preference as a function of underlying likelihoods. Using this design, we find a behavioral main effect of ambiguity aversion, with increasing ambiguity aversion as a function of higher beliefs regarding the likelihood of reciprocity, and related neural activity in the right IPS. This brain region was primarily involved when participants experienced lottery-based uncertainty as opposed to social uncertainty. However, we found that the right IFG was more involved when participants made decisions under social, as compared to non-social, uncertainty. Overall, therefore, the IPS may activate an analytic mindset, which might resonate more with a lottery than a social context, whereas the IFG is engaged when the context requires players to resolve uncertainty, such as unraveling the intentions behind the choice of another person.

Social inclusion of students with special educational needs assessed by the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale.

How does the participation of students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream education affect their social inclusion? We introduce a single-item pictorial measure, the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS), to compare the social inclusion of SEN students attending mainstream regular schools to social inclusion of SEN students attending special schools. We collected responses from 138 parents of SEN students aged 4-20, to obtain data on the loneliness, friendships and social inclusion of SEN students. The parents of SEN students attending regular schools did not perceive their children to be less included than parents of SEN students attending special schools. School context decreased SEN students' perceived loneliness independent of the school type. And while most SEN students' friendships were formed at school, SEN students attending regular schools had more friends, and these were more likely to live in the same neighborhood. Overall, the social inclusion of SEN students across school types was not affected by the school type, only by the school's inclusive characteristics.

Subjective Beliefs About Trust and Reciprocity Activate an Expected Reward Signal in the Ventral Striatum.

There is overwhelming evidence that the evaluation of both reward decisions and their associated outcomes are closely linked with bilateral activation of the ventral striatum, with these insights stemming from tasks such as the monetary incentive delay task for lotteries and multiround Trust Games for social settings. The essential element in these tasks is an externally provided cue associated with specific gains/trustworthy partners and losses/non-trustworthy partners. However, in reality people typically use their own beliefs to guide their decision-making and assess the likelihood of positive or and negative outcomes. As when participants assess the relationship between cues and rewards, individuals should anticipate rewards in correspondence to their beliefs, i.e., the higher the belief of obtaining a reward in the future, the higher the anticipation of reward. In this study, we use decision-makers' own, naturally occurring, beliefs about both social and non-social contexts to examine the subsequent outcome of their choices. We hypothesize that mechanisms of belief-mediated reward processing are mediated by neural activation in the ventral striatum. An essential feature of our design is the elicitation of individuals' beliefs prior to the decision-making task itself. Furthermore, our incentivized, non-deceptive, decision-making task distinguishes between social - implemented by a Trust Game - and non-social sources, as well as risk and ambiguity as underlying types of uncertainty. Our main result shows that individual beliefs regarding reciprocity likelihoods in both the Trust Game and the lottery influence the amount invested. Subsequently, only the investment amount in the Trust Game parametrically modulates anticipatory reward and outcome evaluation in the ventral striatum. This study demonstrates a first approach at using participants' subjective sets of beliefs to examine reward processing. We discuss its potential promise, outline some limitations, and propose follow-up studies to extend the current approach.

Mothers more altruistic than fathers, but only when bearing responsibility alone: evidence from parental choice experiments in Tanzania.

Evolutionary theory predicts humans to be more altruistic towards genetically more closely related kin. Because fathers face uncertainty about the relation to their children, the asymmetric parental altruism hypothesis predicts mothers to provide a higher share of parental care than fathers. We tested this hypothesis using parental choice experiments in rural Tanzania, in which fathers and mothers could choose between an outcome that benefited themselves and an outcome that benefited their children. When a parent was solely responsible for the outcome, mothers chose more altruistic than fathers. However when the choice situation was changed into a coordination game in which responsibility was shared with the partner, the sex difference disappeared. Fathers then chose somewhat more altruistic, but mothers substantially less. Our findings thus partly support the asymmetric parental altruism hypothesis, but they also show that parental altruism is influenced by the context in which choices are taken.

LoMAPAM--Logical Model of Autowave Processes of Amoebic Movement.

This work describes a logical discrete model of the spatiotemporal dynamics of amoebic movement (Logical Model of Autowave Processes of Amoebic Movement (LoMAPAM)) based on finite automata (homogeneous structures) and specified for Physarum polycephalum. The basic system of passing rules for the information and regulation levels of the model, describing the contractile behavior of the ectoplasmic walls of P. polycephalum, enables a rhythmic generation of contractile waves and their propagation in the ectoplasmic wall due to the created structure of the LoMAPAM model. The finite automata corresponds to elementary square planar elements. This construction is alike homogeneous structures with the only exception is its finite. The planar element is assigned to the pair of integers (i,j). The state vector defined for every element (i,j) in discrete time t will have three components. Each of them will be written in one of the matrices B, C, or W. The information matrix B describes the state of the matter. The regulation matrix C, the local Ca(2+) concentration. The flow matrix W describes the local flow of endoplasm or ectoplasm. The passing rules for the state vector was written in the form of Boolean functions. Six actomyosin generators placed on a circle and three and five neighbouring ectoplasmatic generators on a line and a layer of endoplasm were analysed.