Most experimental preparations demonstrate a role for dorsolateral striatum (DLS) in stimulus-response, but not outcome-based, learning. Here, we assessed DLS involvement in a touchscreen-based reversal task requiring mice to update choice following a change in stimulus-reward contingencies. In vivo single-unit recordings in the DLS showed…

Some previous studies have shown that increased stress hormone levels have beneficial effects on memory encoding; however, there is no clear consensus on which encoding-related processes are affected by stress hormones. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between interindividual differences in neuroendocrine response to acute…

The immediate extinction deficit describes a higher return of fear when extinction takes place immediately after fear acquisition compared to a delayed extinction design. One explanation for this phenomenon encompasses the remaining emotional arousal evoked by fear acquisition to be still present during immediate, but not delayed extinction. In…

In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), functional behaviors such as checking that a door is locked become dysfunctional, maladaptive, and debilitating. However, it is currently unknown how aversive and appetitive motivations interact to produce functional and dysfunctional behavior in OCD. Here we show a double dissociation in the effects 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…

Aversive stimuli not only support fear conditioning to their environmental antecedents, they also punish behaviors that cause their occurrence. The amygdala, especially the basolateral nucleus (BLA), has been critically implicated in Pavlovian fear learning but its role in punishment remains poorly understood. Here, we used a within-subjects…

Behavioral flexibility is vital for survival in an environment of changing contingencies. The nucleus accumbens may play an important role in behavioral flexibility, representing learned stimulus-reward associations in neural activity during response selection and learning from results. To investigate the role of nucleus accumbens neural activity…

BDNF-induced signaling is essential for the development of the central nervous system and critical for plasticity in adults. Mature BDNF signals through TrkB, while its precursor proBDNF employs p75[superscript NTR], resulting in activation of signaling cascades with opposite effects on neuronal survival, growth cone decisions, and synaptic…

Most of the mechanisms involved in neural plasticity support cognition, and aging has a considerable effect on some of these processes. The neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) of the immunoglobulin superfamily plays a pivotal role in structural and functional plasticity and is required to modulate cognitive and emotional behaviors. However,…

The exact roles of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in conditional choice behavior are unknown and a visual contextual response selection task was used for examining the issue. Inactivation of the mPFC severely disrupted performance in the task. mPFC inactivations, however, did not disrupt the capability of perceptual discrimination for visual…

Response strategy in the dual-solution plus maze is regarded as a form of stimulus-response learning. In this study, by using an outcome devaluation procedure, we show that it can be based on both action-outcome and stimulus-response habit learning, depending on the amount of training that the animals receive. Furthermore, we show that…

The goal of the present study was to elucidate the role of the human striatum in learning via reward and punishment during an associative learning task. Previous studies have identified the striatum as a critical component in the neural circuitry of reward-related learning. It remains unclear, however, under what task conditions, and to what…

The association of specific events with the context in which they occur is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. However, the underlying network mechanisms generating what-where associations are poorly understood. Recently we reported that some hippocampal principal neurons develop representations of specific events occurring in particular…

It is well known that emotions participate in the regulation of social behaviors and that the emotion displayed by a conspecific influences the behavior of other animals. In its simplest form, empathy can be characterized as the capacity to be affected by and/or share the emotional state of another. However, to date, relatively little is known…

Hippocampal theta rhythm is thought to underlie learning and memory, and it is well established that "pacemaker" neurons in medial septum (MS) modulate theta activity. Recent studies in the rat demonstrated that brainstem-generated theta rhythm occurs through a multisynaptic pathway via the nucleus incertus (NI), which is the primary source of the…