Abstract non presente - Articolo di rassegna sulle basi neurobiologiche del gioco d'azzardo in una prospettiva interdisciplinare.

Simplicity is a basic principle of science and this implies that, if we want to explain the behaviour of animals by constructing robots that behave like real animals, one and the same robot should reproduce as many behaviours and as many behavioural phenomena as possible. In this paper we describe robots that both evolve and learn in their natural environment and, in addition, learn in the equivalent of an experimental laboratory and reproduce a variety of results of experiments on learning in animals. We introduce a new model of learning in which the weights of the connections that link the units of the robots neural network are genetically inherited and do not change during the robots life but what changes during life and makes the robots learn new behaviours is the synaptic receptivity of a special set of network units which we call learning units. The robots evolve in a variety of different environments and they learn in a variety of different ways including imprinting and learning by imitating the behaviour of others. Then we test the robots in the controlled conditions of an artificial laboratory and we reproduce a number of experimental results on both operant learning and classical conditioning, including learning and extinction curves, the role of the temporal interval between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, and the influence of motivation on learning.

In intertemporal choices, subjects face a trade-off between value and delay: achieving the most valuable outcome requires a longer time, whereas the immediately available option is objectively poorer. Intertemporal choices are ubiquitous, and comparative studies reveal commonalities and differences across species: all species devalue future rewards as a function of delay (delay aversion), yet there is a lot of inter-specific variance in how rapidly such devaluation occurs. These differences are often interpreted in terms of ecological rationality, as depending on environmental factors (e.g., feeding ecology) and the physiological and morphological constraints of different species (e.g., metabolic rate). Evolutionary hypotheses, however, are hard to verify in vivo, since it is difficult to observe precisely enough real environments, not to mention ancestral ones. In this paper, we discuss the viability of an approach based on evolutionary robotics: in Study 1, we evolve robots without a metabolism in five different ecologies; in Study 2, we evolve metabolic robots (i.e., robots that consume energy over time) in three different ecologies. The intertemporal choices of the robots are analyzed both in their ecology and under laboratory conditions. Results confirm the generality of delay aversion and the usefulness of studying intertemporal choice through experimental evolutionary robotics.

In this paper we investigate whether selective attention enables the development of action selection (i.e. the ability to select among conflicting actions afforded by the current agent/environmental context). By carrying out a series of experiments in which neuro-robots have been evolved for the ability to forage so to maximize the energy that can be extracted from ingested substances we observed that effective action and action selection capacities can be developed even in the absence of internal mechanisms specialized for action selection. However, the comparison of the results obtained in different experimental conditions in which the robots were or were not provided with internal modulatory connections demonstrate how selective attention enables the development of a more effective action selection capacity and of more effective and integrated action capacities. © The Author(s) 2013.

A population of male and female robots evolves in an environment in which to remain alive they must eat the food contained in the environment and to reproduce they must mate with a robot of the opposite sex. The only difference between male and female robots is that after mating males can mate again (reproductively) while females have a fixed period during which they are nonreproductive. The results show that males have a greater variance in reproductive success compared to females and they tend to be always very active looking for the "scarce resource" constituted by reproductive females and eating any food they are able to find while they are looking for reproductive females. Reproductive females are less active than males and they adopt the reproductive strategy of waiting for males to find and mate with them. On the contrary, nonreproductive females are as active as males but they look for food and are not interested in anything else. We also find a number of differences between males and females in their preferences for different types of food and in offspring care if males do not have parental certainty.