Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who were interested in working as behavior technicians for young children with autism, participated in 2 experiments. Participants included 5 adults with Asperger syndrome or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, 19 to 23 years old, and 11 children with autism, 3 to 7 years old. In…

Feeding in "Aplysia" provides an amenable model system for analyzing the neuronal substrates of motivated behavior and its adaptability by associative reward learning and neuromodulation. Among such learning processes, appetitive operant conditioning that leads to a compulsive-like expression of feeding actions is known to be associated…

Adolescent rats exhibit impaired extinction retention compared to pre-adolescent and adult rats. A single nonreinforced exposure to the conditioned stimulus (CS; a retrieval trial) given shortly before extinction has been shown in some circumstances to reduce the recovery of fear after extinction in adult animals. This study investigated whether a…

Recent research shows that while initial learning is dependent on "N"-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDArs), relearning can be NMDAr-independent. In the present study we examined whether this switch also occurs following forgetting. The developing animal exhibits much more rapid rates of forgetting than adults, so infant rats were used. It was…

The present study sought to determine whether post-training exposure to a novel or familiar object, encountered in either the location of the original fear conditioning (black compartment of a passive avoidance {PA} chamber) or in a neutral setting (open field where initial object training had occurred) would prove capable of reducing fear at…

We have previously shown that intracerebellar infusion of the neuropeptide secretin enhances the acquisition phase of eyeblink conditioning (EBC). Here, we sought to test whether endogenous secretin also regulates EBC and to test whether the effect of exogenous and endogenous secretin is specific to acquisition. In Experiment 1, rats received…

This study examines the role of stimulus duration in learning and memory formation of honeybees ("Apis mellifera"). In classical appetitive conditioning honeybees learn the association between an initially neutral, conditioned stimulus (CS) and the occurrence of a meaningful stimulus, the unconditioned stimulus (US). Thereby the CS…

The current study involved an evaluation of the emergence of untrained verbal relations as a function of 3 different foreign-language teaching strategies. Two Spanish-speaking adults received foreign-language (English) tact training and native-to-foreign and foreign-to-native intraverbal training. Tact training and native-to-foreign intraverbal…

Memory is a dynamic process that allows encoding, storage, and retrieval of information acquired through individual experience. In the honeybee "Apis mellifera," olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER) has shown that besides short-term memory (STM) and mid-term memory (MTM), two phases of long-term memory (LTM)…

Two things are worth remembering about an aversive event: What made it happen? What made it cease? If a stimulus precedes an aversive event, it becomes a signal for threat and will later elicit behavior indicating conditioned fear. However, if the stimulus is presented upon cessation of the aversive event, it elicits behavior indicating…

Propositional models of evaluative conditioning postulate that the impact of stimulus pairings on liking should depend not on the pairings themselves but on what the pairings imply about the relation between stimuli. Hence, context manipulations that change the implications of stimulus pairings should moderate evaluative conditioning. We…

An important process by which preferences emerge is evaluative conditioning, defined as a change in the evaluation of a stimulus by pairing it repeatedly and consistently with an affective stimulus. The current research focuses on the role of motivation in this learning process. Specifically, it was investigated whether a conditioning procedure…

The evaluative conditioning (EC) effect is defined as a change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a valenced unconditioned stimulus (US). The current research investigated the controllability of EC effects by asking participants to either promote or prevent the influence of CS-US pairings before they provided…

Millions of Americans are diagnosed with dementia, and that number is only expected to rise. The diagnosis of dementia comes with impairments, especially in language. Furthermore, dementia-related functional declines appear to be moderated by environmental variables (Alzheimer's Association, "Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the…

Protein synthesis is involved in the consolidation of short-term memory into long-term memory. Previous electrophysiological data concerning LTP in CA3 suggest that protein synthesis in that region might also be necessary for short-term memory. We tested this hypothesis by locally injecting the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin in hippocampal…