The loss of behavioral flexibility is common across a number of neuropsychiatric illnesses. This may be in part due to the loss of the ability to detect or use changes in action-outcome contingencies to guide behavior. There is growing evidence that the ventral hippocampus plays a critical role in the regulation of flexible behavior and…

Reward contingencies and other extrinsic constraints on behavior can lead to reduced levels of interest in and/or decreased engagement in a target activity in a subsequent noncontingent situation. It has been hypothesized that this effect is caused by a change in the self-perceived locus of motivation from intrinsic to extrinsic. It follows from…

The effects of different schedules of noncontingent reward on subsequent learning in children were investigated. In the first phase of the experiment subjects performed a block-design matching task and received one of three schedules of noncontingent reward, i.e., continuous reward (Group CRF), random reward on 50% of the trials (Group 50R), or no…