Five reinforcing activities were presented to and interrupted for two participants with autism. An errorless teaching procedure was then introduced with two similar activities prompting the participants to request information saying "How?" in order to resume the activity. The dependent variable included both the cumulative number of…

Aversive events can trigger relapse of extinguished fear memories, presenting a major challenge to the long-term efficacy of therapeutic interventions. Here, we examined factors regulating the relapse of extinguished fear after exposure of rats to a dangerous context. Rats received unsignaled shock in a distinct context ("dangerous"…

Associative learning tasks commonly involve an auditory stimulus, which must be projected through the auditory system to the sites of memory induction for learning to occur. The cochlear nucleus (CN) projection to the pontine nuclei has been posited as the necessary auditory pathway for cerebellar learning, including eyeblink conditioning.…

Reciprocal conversations, instructional activities, and other social interactions are replete with multiply controlled intraverbals, examples of which have been conceptualized in terms of conditional discriminations. Although the acquisition of conditional discriminations has been examined extensively in the behavior-analytic literature, little…

Behavioral exposure therapy, which involves extinction of the previously acquired fear, has been used to treat anxiety-related symptoms such as post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been hypothesized that proextinction pharmacotherapeutics may enhance the efficacy of exposure therapy. Systemic administration of the metabotropic glutamate receptor…

Although the basolateral amygdala (BLA) plays a crucial role for the acquisition of fear memories, sensory cortices are involved in their long-term storage in rats. However, the time course of their respective involvement has received little investigation. Here we assessed the role of the glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the…

It has been suggested that, unlike pure extinction which typically results in the return of the fear response under a variety of circumstances, memory reactivation followed by extinction can attenuate the reemergence of conditioned fear. The reactivation-extinction procedure has attracted the attention of basic and clinical researchers due to its…

Anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress, are more prevalent in women and are characterized by impaired inhibition of learned fear and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) dysfunction. Here we examined sex differences in fear extinction and mPFC activity in rats. Females showed more learned fear expression during extinction and its recall, but…

Dopamine is broadly implicated in fear-related processes, yet we know very little about signaling dynamics in these neurons during active fear conditioning. We describe the direct imaging of calcium signals of dopamine neurons during Pavlovian fear conditioning using fiber-optic confocal microscopy coupled with the genetically encoded calcium…

The performance of developing zebrafish in both classical and operant conditioning assays was tested with a particular focus on the emergence of these learning behaviors during development. Strategically positioned visual cues paired with electroshocks were used in two fully automated assays to investigate both learning paradigms. These allow the…

Several studies have demonstrated the mechanisms involved in memory persistence after learning. However, little is known about memory persistence after retrieval. In this study, a protein synthesis inhibitor, anisomycin, was infused into the basolateral amygdala of mice 9.5 h after retrieval of contextual conditioned fear. Anisomycin attenuated…

Modifications in chromatin structure have been widely implicated in memory and cognition, most notably using hippocampal-dependent memory paradigms including object recognition, spatial memory, and contextual fear memory. Relatively little is known, however, about the role of chromatin-modifying enzymes in amygdala-dependent memory formation.…

Conventional wisdom dictates we must face our fears to conquer them. This idea is embodied in exposure-based treatments for anxiety disorders, where the intent of exposure is to reverse a history of avoidant behavior that is thought to fuel a patient's irrational fears. We tested in humans the relationship between fear and avoidance by combining…

Preparation over time is a ubiquitous capacity which implies decreasing uncertainty about when critical events will occur. This capacity is usually studied with the variable foreperiod paradigm, which consists in the random variation of the time interval (foreperiod) between a warning stimulus and a target. With this paradigm, response time (RT)…

Memory formation is thought to occur via enhanced synaptic connectivity between populations of neurons in the brain. However, it has been difficult to localize and identify the neurons that are directly involved in the formation of any specific memory. We have previously used "fos-tau-lacZ" ("FTL") transgenic mice to identify…