Long-term but not short-term memory and synaptic plasticity in many brain areas require neurotrophin signaling, transcription, and epigenetic mechanisms including DNA methylation. However, it has been difficult to relate these cellular mechanisms directly to behavior because of the immense complexity of the mammalian brain. To address that…

Contextual specificity of Latent Inhibition (LI) has been demonstrated using an ample range of experimental procedures. Context dependence has not been consistently obtained, however, when LI has been induced using a Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) procedure. This paper presents two experiments designed to analyze whether the context plays the…

A theory devised initially on the basis of instrumental reward schedule data, such as the PREE, was extended to deal with various Pavlovian findings. These Pavlovian findings include blocking, unblocking, relative validity, positive and negative patterning, renewal, reinstatement, reacquisition, and inhibition. In addition, the sequential model…

Three conditioned suppression experiments examined the Hall-Pearce (1979) negative transfer effect in rats. Experiment 1 replicated the effect: CS-US[subscript weak] pairings retarded subsequent fear conditioning to the CS as a result of CS-US[subscript strong] pairings. The size of this retardation was less than that produced by non-reinforced CS…

Repeated exposures to a target taste (X) attenuated subsequent development of rats' conditioned aversion to X (latent inhibition effect). Presentation of another taste (A) after X in conditioning (serial X-A compound conditioning) also attenuated conditioned X aversion compared with conditioning without A (overshadowing). Furthermore, the latent…

The present experiment compared the effects of a food-based conditioned inhibitor on food seeking vs. cocaine seeking behavior. In two groups of rats, the A+/AB- Pavlovian conditioned inhibition procedure was used to create a conditioned inhibitor for food. Then, for one group of rats (Food-Food Group), a click stimulus was established as an…

The effects of prenatal choline availability on Pavlovian conditioning were assessed in adult male rats (3-4 mo). Neither supplementation nor deprivation of prenatal choline affected the acquisition and extinction of simple Pavlovian conditioned excitation, or the acquisition and retardation of conditioned inhibition. However, prenatal choline…

The cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) is known to play a critical role in both transcription-independent short-term or intermediate-term memory and transcription-dependent long-term memory (LTM). Although distinct phases of LTM already have been demonstrated in some systems, it is not known whether these phases require distinct temporal patterns…

Two conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats were conducted to establish if a target taste that had received a prior pairing with illness could be subject to second-order conditioning during extinction treatment in compound with a flavor that also received prior conditioning. In these experiments, the occurrence of second-order…

Two lick suppression studies were conducted with water-deprived rats to investigate the influence of spatial similarity in cue interaction. Experiment 1 assessed the influence of similarity of the spatial origin of competing cues in a blocking procedure. Greater blocking was observed in the condition in which the auditory blocking cue and the…

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated simultaneous (XA-/A+) vs. sequential (X [right arrow] A-/A+) Feature Negative (FN) discrimination learning in humans. We expected the simultaneous discrimination to result in X (or alternatively the XA configuration) becoming an inhibitor acting directly on the US, and the sequential…

We begin with the suggestion that the definition of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) still faces some challenges. Conceptually, inhibition of the Pavlovian kind preexisted the "behavioral inhibition" popular in the USA; the difference between them has to be understood in order to understand ADHD. The present project examines…

In two conditioned lick suppression experiments using water-deprived rats, we examined the effects of following Pavlovian conditioned inhibition training (i.e., A-US/AX-NoUS) with pairings of the training excitor (A) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of this posttraining inflation treatment on Pavlovian…

In four conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats as subjects, the effects of extinguished or pre-exposed flavors on retardation and summation tests was compared. Experiment 1 showed that when steps were taken to ensure similar exposure to the target flavor in all conditions, acquisition after pre-exposure and reacquisition after extinction…