Why we remember emotional events with an increased subjective sense of remembering (SSR) is unclear. SSR for neutral events is linked to memory for various kinds of details. Using the Remember/Know paradigm, participants provided written justifications of their Remember responses indicating what they specifically recollected about a negative or…

Sensory feedback shapes ongoing behavior and may produce learning and memory. Motor responses to edible or inedible food in a reduced Aplysia preparation were examined to test how sensory feedback affects behavior and memory. Feeding patterns were initiated by applying a cholinomimetic onto the cerebral ganglion. Feedback from buccal muscles…

The loss of behavioral flexibility is common across a number of neuropsychiatric illnesses. This may be in part due to the loss of the ability to detect or use changes in action-outcome contingencies to guide behavior. There is growing evidence that the ventral hippocampus plays a critical role in the regulation of flexible behavior and…

Protein kinase M[zeta] (PKM[zeta]) maintains long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term memory through persistent increases in kinase expression. Early-life adversity is a precursor to adult mood and anxiety disorders, in part, through persistent disruption of emotional memory throughout life. Here we subjected 10- to 16-wk-old male bonnet…

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…

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…

This study demonstrates that overtraining in temporal discrimination modifies temporal stimulus control in a bisection task and produces habitual responding, as evidenced through insensitivity to food devaluation. Rats were trained or overtrained in a 2-versus 8-sec temporal discrimination task, with each duration associated with a lever (left or…

We present evidence that experience and cholinergic modulation in an early sensory network interact to improve certainty about olfactory stimuli. The data we present are in agreement with existing theoretical ideas about the functional role of acetylcholine but highlight the importance of early sensory networks in addition to cortical networks. We…

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 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…

The insular cortex (IC) is required for conditioned taste aversion (CTA) retrieval. However, it remains unknown which cortical neurotransmitters levels are modified upon CTA retrieval. Using in vivo microdialysis, we observed that there were clear elevations in extracellular glutamate, norepinephrine, and dopamine in and around the center of the…

According to dual-process theory, recognition memory performance draws upon two processes, familiarity and recollection. The relative contribution to recognition memory are commonly distinguished in humans by analyzing receiver-operating-characteristics (ROC) curves; analogous methods are more complex and very rare in animals but fast familiarity…

Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Reality-monitoring errors occur when internally generated thoughts are remembered as external occurrences. We hypothesized that sleep-dependent memory consolidation could reduce them by strengthening connections between items and their contexts during an afternoon nap. Participants viewed words and imagined their referents. Pictures of the…

Signaled active avoidance (SigAA) is the key experimental procedure for studying the acquisition of instrumental responses toward conditioned threat cues. Traditional analytic approaches (e.g., general linear model) often obfuscate important individual differences, although individual differences in learned responses characterize both animal and…