Motivators and barriers to blood donation among potential donors of African and Caucasian ethnicity.

Background: Minority blood donation, especially from individuals of African ethnicity, is a focus for many countries with diverse populations. As the need for antigen-negative RBC transfusions for patients with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) continues to grow, inclusion of more African blood donors is essential to ensure this demand is met.

Materials And Methods: This study aims to explore barriers and motivators to blood donation and awareness of SCD among potential donors of diverse ethnic backgrounds in Ireland.

Bonsai trees in your head: how the pavlovian system sculpts goal-directed choices by pruning decision trees.

When planning a series of actions, it is usually infeasible to consider all potential future sequences; instead, one must prune the decision tree. Provably optimal pruning is, however, still computationally ruinous and the specific approximations humans employ remain unknown. We designed a new sequential reinforcement-based task and showed that human subjects adopted a simple pruning strategy: during mental evaluation of a sequence of choices, they curtailed any further evaluation of a sequence as soon as they encountered a large loss.