"Fire! Do not fire!": Investigating the effects of autonomous systems on agency and moral decision-making.

Autonomous systems have pervaded many aspects of human activities. However, research suggests that the interaction with these machines may influence human decision-making processes. These effects raise ethical concerns in moral situations.

Influence of AI behavior on human moral decisions, agency, and responsibility.

There is a growing interest in understanding the effects of human-machine interaction on moral decision-making (Moral-DM) and sense of agency (SoA). Here, we investigated whether the "moral behavior" of an AI may affect both moral-DM and SoA in a military population, by using a task in which cadets played the role of drone operators on a battlefield. Participants had to decide whether or not to initiate an attack based on the presence of enemies and the risk of collateral damage.

Renewal of instrumental avoidance in humans.

The ABA renewal effect occurs when behavior is trained in one context (A), extinguished in a second context (B), and the test occurs in the training context (A). Two mechanisms that explain ABA renewal are context summation at the test and contextual modulation of extinction learning, with the former being unlikely if both contexts have a similar associative history. In two experiments, we used within-subjects designs in which participants learned to avoid a loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) signaled by discrete visual stimuli (conditioned stimuli [CSs]), by pressing the space bar on the computer keyboard.

Higher-Order Conditioning With Simultaneous and Backward Conditioned Stimulus: Implications for Models of Pavlovian Conditioning.

In a new environment, humans and animals can detect and learn that cues predict meaningful outcomes, and use this information to adapt their responses. This process is termed Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning is also observed for stimuli that predict outcome-associated cues; a second type of conditioning is termed higher-order Pavlovian conditioning.

Effect of non-instructed instrumental contingency of monetary reward and positive affect in a cognitive control task.

In recent years, we observed a strong interest in the influence of motivation and emotion on cognitive control. Prior studies suggest that the instrumental contingency between a response and a rewarding or affective stimulus is particularly important in that context-which is resonating with observations in the associative learning literature. However, despite this overlap, and the relevance of non-instructed learning in real life, the vast majority of studies investigating motivation-cognition interactions use direct instructions to inform participants about the contingencies between responses and stimuli.

Selective reinforcement of conflict processing in the Stroop task.

Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specific congruency-reward contingencies in a manual Stroop task.

Expecting the good: Symbolic valence signals provoke action biases and undermine goal-directed behavior.

Positive and negative events are known to trigger opposing action tendencies (approach vs. avoidance). Recently, we found that advance monetary incentive cues can override such valence-action biases.

Excitatory second-order conditioning using a backward first-order conditioned stimulus: A challenge for prediction error reduction.

Prével and colleagues reported excitatory learning with a backward conditioned stimulus (CS) in a conditioned reinforcement preparation. Their results add to existing evidence of backward CSs sometimes being excitatory and were viewed as challenging the view that learning is driven by prediction error reduction, which assumes that only predictive (i.e.