A General Feedback Theory of Human Behavior (1960)

In psychology, this is called "Reinforcement"[1] and that goes back to Skinner (1938) and Thorndike (1911).

In AI research its called "Reinforcement learning"[2]. One of the earliest papers relating reinforcement learning to AI was “Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems”[3] by Minsky, 1954

A cool reinforcement learning demo is the DeepMind Atari video from last year[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning

[3] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/36374626_Theory_of_n...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ (this is awesome)