This page references the live models from D4.3 of Prosocial Project.

Reward

There are three inputs into the system which represent how well a skill is being displayed; Too Much, Too Little and Just Right. The former two actions trigger the Negative gate whilst the remaining triggers the Positive gate. This second layer of gates filters actions into whether they displayed the measured skills or not.

The system works with buckets being filled with credits. When a bucket reaches its threshold, it empties and triggers a reward or a feedback depending on the bucket.

If a Positive action is taken, it fills the  Reward Bucket with Reward Credits based on the current Credit Rate.

The Credit Rate is decreased the more Positive actions that are taken, and conversely increased when Negative actions are taken. This represents the player not being excessively rewarded if they are already displaying skills and being greatly rewarded if displaying the skill for the first time out of many incorrect attempts, respectively.

When the Reward Bucket’s contents meet the threshold, the bucket empties and increments the Total Rewards count (the amount of which it is being incremented by corresponds to the size of the reward).

The other bucket in the system is used to denote when the player should be given feedback on their actions. Each time a Negative action is taken, the number of Feedback Credits in the Feedback Bucket increases by one. Similarly to the Reward Bucket, when the number of credits meets the threshold, the bucket empties and increments the number of Total Feedbacks.

Each time the player makes a Positive action, it decrements the number of credits in the Feedback Bucket by one, representing a reduction in need to present feedback to the player when they display the measured skill.

 

Feedback

The more detailed feedback machination separates the feedback bucket into Excessive, Insufficient and Incorrect buckets. Now when a player triggers the a Negative action, it will add Feedback Credits to the appropriate bucket.

In the case of Excessive and Insufficient buckets, to represent the sliding nature of the player’s position on the sufficiency scale when performing an action, the buckets will draw credits from each other, if able.

Performing the Incorrect action will drain credits from the Excessive and Insufficient buckets, which moves the player closer towards receiving feedback about doing the wrong action rather than an incorrect frequency of the right action. Performing the action Just Right will drain credits from each of the feedback buckets.

When a feedback check reaches its threshold, it drains credits from the related bucket to produce a feedback of the correct type.