Acceptability of the Transitional Wearable Companion "+" in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Comparative Pilot Study.

+ is an experimental interactive soft toy, looking like a panda, developed for young children. When touched on the paws or head (inputs), the toy can emit attractive responses such as colored lights and amusing sounds (outputs). + is wirelessly connected to a control tablet through which an adult caregiver can modify its input-output contingencies so as to produce different, rewarding response patterns using the same device.

Acceptability of the Transitional Wearable Companion "+me" in Typical Children: A Pilot Study.

This work presents the results of the first experimentation of +-the first prototype of -run on 15 typically developed (TD) children with ages between 8 and 34 months. + is an interactive device that looks like a teddy bear that can be worn around the neck, has touch sensors, can emit appealing lights and sounds, and has input-output contingencies that can be regulated with a tablet via Bluetooth. The participants were engaged in social play activities involving both the device and an adult experimenter.

Keep focussing: striatal dopamine multiple functions resolved in a single mechanism tested in a simulated humanoid robot.

The effects of striatal dopamine (DA) on behavior have been widely investigated over the past decades, with "phasic" burst firings considered as the key expression of a reward prediction error responsible for reinforcement learning. Less well studied is "tonic" DA, where putative functions include the idea that it is a regulator of vigor, incentive salience, disposition to exert an effort and a modulator of approach strategies. We present a model combining tonic and phasic DA to show how different outflows triggered by either intrinsically or extrinsically motivating stimuli dynamically affect the basal ganglia by impacting on a selection process this system performs on its cortical input.