Generalization of fear can involve abnormal responding to cues that signal safety and is common in people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Differential auditory fear conditioning can be used as a tool to measure changes in fear discrimination and generalization. Most prior work in this area has focused on elevated amygdala activity…

We explored the circumstances in which rats engage either declarative memory (and the hippocampus) or habit memory (and the dorsal striatum). Rats with damage to the hippocampus or dorsal striatum were given three different two-choice discrimination tasks (odor, object, and pattern). These tasks differed in the number of trials required for…

We have previously reported that sound sequence discrimination learning requires cholinergic inputs to the auditory cortex (AC) in rats. In that study, reward was used for motivating discrimination behavior in rats. Therefore, dopaminergic inputs mediating reward signals may have an important role in the learning. We tested the possibility in the…

We investigated learning-related changes in amplitude, scalp topography, and source localization of the mismatch negativity (MMN), a neurophysiological response correlated with auditory discrimination ability. Participants (n = 32) underwent two EEG recordings while they watched silent films and ignored auditory stimuli. Stimuli were a standard…