Previous research on training auditory-visual conditional discriminations (AVCDs) have compared several prompt types including gestural, positional, and identity-matching prompts. Other prompting procedures, such as those that involve the manipulation of the comparison array, have received less attention in the applied literature. For example, the…

Local protein synthesis at synapses can provide a rapid supply of proteins to support synaptic changes during consolidation of new memories, but its role in the maintenance or updating of established memories is unknown. Consolidation requires new protein synthesis in the period immediately following learning, whereas established memories are…

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of…

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…

Fear is an adaptive emotion that serves to protect an organism against potential dangers. It is often studied using classical conditioning paradigms where a conditioned stimulus is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus to induce a threat response. Less commonly studied is a phenomenon that is related to this form of conditioning, known as…

Chronic stress typically leads to deficits in fear extinction when tested soon after chronic stress ends. Given the importance of extinction in updating fear memories, the current study examined whether fear extinction was impaired in rats that were chronically stressed and then given a break from the end of chronic stress to the start of fear…

Discrimination between sensory stimuli associated with safety and threat is crucial for behavioral decisions. Discriminative conditioning paradigms with two acoustic conditioned stimuli (one paired with shock [CS+], the other unpaired with shock [CS-]) have been widely used as an experimental model for fear learning. However, no attention has been…

Inclusion of male and female subjects in behavioral neuroscience research requires a concerted effort to characterize sex differences in standardized behavioral assays. Sex differences in hippocampus-dependent assays have been widely reported but are still poorly characterized. In the present study, we conducted a parametric analysis of…

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…

Animals in a natural environment confront many sensory cues. Some of these cues bias behavioral decisions independent of experience, and action selection can reveal a stimulus-response (S-R) connection. However, in a changing environment it would be a benefit for an animal to update behavioral action selection based on experience, and learning…

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…

While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or…

Early experiences with sexual reward play a pivotal role in the formation of sexual behavior and partner preference. Associations of salient partner cues, or even neutral cues on a partner, with sexual reward states are a product of Pavlovian learning. However, the extent to which first experiences that associate a neutral stimulus with no…

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…

In cocaine use disorder, relapse can be elicited by drug-associated cues despite long periods of abstinence. The persistence of drug-associated cues in eliciting drug seeking suggests enduring changes in structural and functional plasticity, which may be mediated by basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF, FGF2). Stimulant drug use increases bFGF…