Sign-tracking is a form of autoshaping where animals develop conditioned responding directed toward stimuli predictive of an outcome even though the outcome is not contingent on the animal's behavior. Sign-tracking behaviors are thought to arise out of the attribution of incentive salience (i.e., motivational value) to reward-predictive cues. It…

The performance of developing zebrafish in both classical and operant conditioning assays was tested with a particular focus on the emergence of these learning behaviors during development. Strategically positioned visual cues paired with electroshocks were used in two fully automated assays to investigate both learning paradigms. These allow the…

Previous studies suggested that the beta-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol might be a novel, potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This hypothesis stemmed mainly from rodent studies showing that propranolol interferes with the reconsolidation of Pavlovian fear conditioning (FC). However, subsequent investigations…

Two-way active avoidance (2WAA) involves learning Pavlovian (association of a sound cue with a foot shock) and instrumental (shock avoidance) contingencies. To identify regions where dopamine (DA) is involved in mediating 2WAA, we restored DA signaling in specific brain areas of dopamine-deficient (DD) mice by local reactivation of conditionally…

In appetitive Pavlovian learning, animals learn to associate discrete cues or environmental contexts with rewarding outcomes, and these cues and/or contexts can potentiate an ongoing instrumental response for reward. Although anatomical substrates underlying cued and contextual learning have been proposed, it remains unknown whether specific…

A distributed limbic-corticostriatal circuitry is implicated in cue-induced drug craving and relapse. Exposure to drug-paired cues not only precipitates relapse, but also triggers the reactivation and reconsolidation of the cue-drug memory. However, the limbic cortical-striatal circuitry underlying drug memory reconsolidation is unclear. The aim…

Extensive evidence indicates that the septum plays a predominant role in fear learning, yet the direction of this control is still a matter of debate. Increasing data suggest that the medial (MS) and lateral septum (LS) would be differentially required in fear conditioning depending on whether a discrete conditional stimulus (CS) predicts, or not,…

The present work introduces a form of associative mechanosensory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex (PER) in honeybees. In our paradigm, harnessed honeybees learn the elemental association between mechanosensory, antennal stimulation and a reward of sucrose solution delivered to the proboscis. Thereafter, bees extend their proboscis to…

Convergent data suggest dissociated roles for the lateral (LA) and basolateral (BLA) amygdaloid nuclei in fear conditioning, depending on whether a discrete conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditional stimulus (US) or context-US association is considered. Here, we show that pretraining inactivation of the BLA selectively impaired conditioning to…

When a sensory cue was repeatedly followed by a behavioral event with fixed delays, pairs of premotor and primary motor neurons showed significant increases of coincident spikes at times a monkey was expecting the event. These results provided evidence that neuronal firing synchrony has predictive power. To elucidate the underlying mechanism, here…

Pavlovian stimuli can markedly elevate instrumental responding, an effect known as Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT). As the role of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in PIT is yet unknown, we examined the effects of transient VTA inactivation by direct microinjections of a mixture of the GABA[subscript A] and GABA[subscript B] receptor…

The widely used Pavlovian fear-conditioning paradigms used for studying the neurobiology of learning and memory have mainly used auditory cues as conditioned stimuli (CS). The present work assessed the neural network involved in olfactory fear conditioning, using olfactory bulb stimulation-induced field potential signal (EFP) as a marker of…