Balancing exploration and anti-predation are fundamental to the fitness and survival of all animal species from early life stages. How these basic survival instincts drive learning remains poorly understood. Here, using a light/dark preference paradigm with well-controlled luminance history and constant visual surrounding in larval zebrafish, we…

Attention, the mechanism that prioritizes stimuli in the environment for further processing, plays an important role in behavioral choice. In the present study, we investigated the automatic orienting of attention to cues that signal reward. Such attentional capture occurs despite negative consequences, and we investigated whether this…

In an ever-changing environment, survival depends on learning which stimuli represent threat, and also on updating such associations when circumstances shift. It has been claimed that humans can acquire physiological responses to threat-associated stimuli even when they are unaware of them, but the role of awareness in updating threat…

During associative retrieval, the brain reinstates neural representations that were present during encoding. The human medial temporal lobe (MTL), with its subregions hippocampus (HC), perirhinal cortex (PRC), and parahippocampal cortex (PHC), plays a central role in neural reinstatement. Previous studies have given compelling evidence for…

Visual imagery and mental reconstruction of scenes are considered core components of episodic memory retrieval. Individuals with absent visual imagery (aphantasia) score lower on tests of autobiographical memory, suggesting that aphantasia may be associated with differences in episodic and associative processing. In this online study, we tested…

Four experiments examined the effects of a dangerous context and a systemic epinephrine injection on sensory preconditioning in rats. In each experiment, rats were exposed to presentations of a tone and light in stage 1, light-shock pairings in stage 2, and test presentations of the tone alone and light alone in stage 3. Presentations of the tone…

Binding visual features into coherent object representations is essential both in short- and long-term memory. However, the relationship between feature binding processes at different memory delays remains unexplored. Here, we addressed this question by using the Mnemonic Similarity Task and a delayed-estimation working memory task on a large…

When our experience violates our predictions, it is adaptive to update our knowledge to promote a more accurate representation of the world and facilitate future predictions. Theoretical models propose that these mnemonic prediction errors should be encoded into a distinct memory trace to prevent interference with previous, conflicting memories.…

Some previous studies have shown that increased stress hormone levels have beneficial effects on memory encoding; however, there is no clear consensus on which encoding-related processes are affected by stress hormones. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between interindividual differences in neuroendocrine response to acute…

Reducing sensory experiences during the period that immediately follows learning improves long-term memory retention in healthy humans, and even preserves memory in patients with amnesia. To date, it is entirely unclear why this is the case, and identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning this effect requires suitable animal models,…

It is commonly assumed that memories contribute to value-based decisions. Nevertheless, most theories of value-based decision-making do not account for memory influences on choice. Recently, new interest has emerged in the interactions between these two fundamental processes, mainly using reinforcement-based paradigms. Here, we aimed to study the…

There has been considerable focus on investigating age-related memory changes in cognitively healthy older adults, in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders. Previous studies have reported age-related domain-specific changes in older adults, showing increased difficulty encoding and processing object information but minimal to no impairment in…