In two instrumental conditioning experiments with rats, we examined the impacts of acquisition and extinction cues on ABC renewal of instrumental behavior. Animals were reinforced with food for lever pressing in one context, followed by extinction of the response in a second one. Presentations of a brief tone accompanied extinction in Experiment 1…

The context in which reward-paired cues are encountered can resolve ambiguity and set the occasion for appropriate reward-seeking. The psychological processes by which contexts regulate reward-seeking remain unclear as contexts are diffuse and difficult to isolate from other stimuli. To overcome this, we modeled a context as a phasic and discrete…

Motivationally attractive cues can draw in behavior in a phenomenon termed incentive salience. Incentive cue attraction is an important model for animal models of drug seeking and relapse. One question of interest is the extent to which the pursuit of motivationally attractive cues is related to the value of the paired outcome or can become…

Threat conditioning is a common associative learning model with translational relevance. How threat-conditioned cues impact on formally unrelated instrumental behavior in humans is not well known. Such an effect is known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT). While PIT with aversive primary Pavlovian reinforcers is established in nonhuman…

Painful events establish opponent memories: cues that precede pain are remembered negatively, whereas cues that follow pain, thus coinciding with relief are recalled positively. How do individual reinforcement-signaling neurons contribute to this "timing-dependent valence-reversal?" We addressed this question using an optogenetic…

Declarative memory performance is superior for items that were encoded in temporal proximity to reward delivery or expectancy. How reward-predicting contexts affect subsequent declarative memory formation in those contexts are, however, unknown. Using an ecological experimental setup in the form of a naturalistic driving simulator task, we…

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…

Previous studies have examined the maturation of learning and memory abilities during early stages of development. By comparison, much less is known about the ontogeny of learning and memory during later stages of development, including adolescence. In Experiment 1, we tested the ability of adolescent and adult rats to learn a Pavlovian negative…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

Contexts and discrete cues associated with drug-taking are often responsible for relapse among addicts. Animal models have shown that interference with the reconsolidation of drug-cue memories can reduce seeking of drugs or drug-paired stimuli. One such model is conditioned place preference (CPP) in which an animal is trained to associate a…

Rats were trained by shocking them in a closed compartment. When subsequently tested in the same closed compartment with no shock, normal rats showed an increased tendency to freeze. They also showed an increased tendency to actively avoid the compartment when given access to an adjacent neutral compartment for the first time. Amygdala…