Working memory is involved in the maintenance and manipulation of information essential for complex cognition. While the neural substrates underlying working memory capacity have been studied in humans, considerably less is known about the circuitry mediating working memory capacity in rodents. Therefore, the present experiments tested the…

Episodic memory enables the detailed and vivid recall of past events, including target and wider contextual information. In this paper, we investigated whether/how encoding intentionality affects the retention of target and contextual episodic information from a novel experience. Healthy adults performed (1) a "What-Where-When"…

The present study investigated how oxytocin (OT) signaling in the central (CeA) and basolateral (BLA) amygdala affects acquisition, expression, and extinction of context-conditioned fear (freezing) in rats. In the first set of experiments, acquisition of fear to a shocked context was impaired by a preconditioning infusion of synthetic OT into the…

In "Aplysia," long-term sensitization (LTS) occurs concurrently with a suppression of feeding. At the cellular level, the suppression of feeding is accompanied by decreased excitability of decision-making neuron B51. We examined the contribution of voltage-gated Na[superscript +] and K[superscript +] channels to B51 decreased…

Integrative encoding and generalization across past experiences depends largely on the hippocampus, an area known to be particularly sensitive to stress. Yet, whether stress influences the ability to generalize memories is unknown. We exposed volunteers to a stressor or a control manipulation before they completed an acquired equivalence task…

This study examines the influence of trait anxiety on working memory (WM) in safety and threat. Interactions between experimentally induced anxiety and WM performance (on different cognitive loads) have been reported in healthy, nonanxious subjects. Differences in trait anxiety may moderate these interactions. Accordingly, these interactions may…

Animal studies suggest that time delay between acquisition and retrieval of contextual anxiety increases generalization. Moreover, such generalization is prevented by preexposure to the context (CTX), presumably due to an improved representation of such context. We investigated whether preexposure and time-passing modulate generalization of…

Stress influences how we remember emotional events and how these events shape future behaviors. However, the impact of stress on memory specificity for emotional events has yet to be examined. To this end, the present study utilized a mnemonic discrimination task that taxes hippocampal pattern separation, the process of distinguishing between…

miR-132 and miR-212 are structurally related microRNAs that have been found to exert powerful modulatory effects within the central nervous system (CNS). Notably, these microRNAs are tandomly processed from the same noncoding transcript, and share a common seed sequence: thus it has been difficult to assess the distinct contribution of each…

Acetylation of histones changes the efficiency of the transcription processes and thus contributes to the formation of long-term memory (LTM). In our comparative study, we used two inhibitors to characterize the contribution of different histone acetyl transferases (HATs) to appetitive associative learning in the honeybee. For one we applied…

We examined whether increasing retrieval difficulty in a spatial memory task would promote the recruitment of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) similar to what is typically observed during remote memory retrieval. Rats were trained on the hidden platform version of the Morris Water Task and tested three or 30 d later. Retrieval difficulty was…

Circadian clocks evolved under conditions of environmental variation, primarily alternating light dark cycles, to enable organisms to anticipate daily environmental events and coordinate metabolic, physiological, and behavioral activities. However, modern lifestyle and advances in technology have increased the percentage of individuals working in…

The amygdalo-nigrostriatal (ANS) network plays an essential role in enhanced attention to significant events. Interval timing requires attention to temporal cues. We assessed rats having a disconnected ANS network, due to contralateral lesions of the medial central nucleus of the amygdala (CEm) and dopaminergic afferents to the lateral striatum,…

Stimuli conditioned with a substance can generate drug-approach behaviors due to their acquired motivational properties. According to implicit theories of addiction, these stimuli can decrease cognitive control automatically. The present study (n = 49) examined whether reward-associated stimuli can interfere with cognitive processes in the absence…

Phosphorylation is a ubiquitous post-translational modification of proteins, and a known physiological regulator of K[superscript +] channel function. Phosphorylation of K[superscript +] channels by kinases has long been presumed to regulate neuronal processing and behavior. Although circumstantial evidence has accumulated from behavioral studies…