Each motivational system may be fuelled by specific incentive value. An ample variety of behavioural studies have taken advantage of the appetitive behaviour of animals and humans.

According to Dickinson and Balleine (2002), behaviour can be learned via two main motivational mechanisms: by IDO inhibitor the successful outcome of a goal-directed instrumental action, or by the classic conditioning stimuli of aversive or appetitive reinforcement according to the composition of the food. Every time we act, we have the opportunity to test the relative efficacy of our incentives; thus, we may not only deduce something new about the stimuli, but we may also evaluate the adequacy of our motivational system. In other words, the cognitive processes and motivational systems appear to be linked because depending on the outcome of an action, we learn

how to finely tune our motivational system for the future (Bignetti, 2001). In this regard, it is an interesting consideration that FW constitutes a real psychological need of the conscious agent, to the extent that the two things are inextricably linked. The paradoxical element of “intentional” action in TBM is that our knowledge is updated by means of past experience, so we may deduce that cognition is a post-adaptive Metformin mechanism. Along the coordinates of knowledge improvement, action Florfenicol will favour cognition and

vice versa (see Fig. 1). This is a type of feed-forward process, which represents one of the most striking examples of the Darwinian evolution of knowledge ( Bignetti, 2001 and Bignetti, 2004). The mechanism by which we select and accumulate knowledge and skill in our life depends on the cooperation between the UM and the CM. Decision-making and action execution are performed by choosing the best response to a stimulus in memory stores on a statistical basis, but once the action has been performed the UM is unable to evaluate the extent of its correctness. Conversely, the CM cannot decide or perform the action, but it can a posteriori evaluate, select and memorise the most correct action from its outcome. Thus, on the one hand, an unconditioned stimulus cannot automatically trigger a successful response; and on the other hand, individuals cannot fully predict the degree of success of an action unless they enact a series of trials and then select and memorise the best one (see the quotation to Tolman’s “cathexis” above).