We proposed that mitral cell [beta]1-adrenoceptor activation mediates rat pup odor preference learning. Here we evaluate [beta]1-, [beta]2-, [alpha]1-, and [alpha]2-adrenoceptor agonists in such learning. The [beta]1-adrenoceptor agonist, dobutamine, and the [alpha]1-adrenoceptor agonist, phenylephrine, induced learning, and both exhibited an…

There is a group of terrestrial crustaceans, the isopods or sowbugs, that spend their lives in the cool, damp and dark microhabitats beneath rocks, decaying logs, and leaf litter. Although these animals are well adapted to exploit these moist niches, they are obligated to live where they do because of their need for moisture and high humidity to…

Vidic and Haaf (2004) questioned the idea that infants use head information to categorize cats as distinct from dogs (Quinn & Eimas, 1996) and argued instead that the torso region is important. However, only null results were observed in the critical test comparisons between modified and unmodified stimuli. In addition, a priori preferences for…

Neurological research has demonstrated that brain activity in animals originally dedicated to the production and regulation of physical activity can be decoupled from that physical activity. Furthermore, animals can use the brain activity in this new condition to achieve particular results such as moving a cursor on a screen. These findings are…

We asked whether honeybees, "Apis mellifera," could solve a transitive inference problem. Individual free-flying bees were conditioned with four overlapping premise pairs of five visual patterns in a multiple discrimination task (A+ vs. B-, B+ vs. C-, C+ vs. D-, D+ vs. E-, where + and - indicate sucrose reward or absence of it,…

Background: Accumulating evidence indicates that prenatal maternal and fetal processes can have a lasting influence on infant and child development. Results from animal models indicate that prenatal exposure to maternal stress and stress hormones has lasting consequences for development of the offspring. Few prospective studies of human pregnancy…

It has been found that disoriented children could use geometric information in combination with landmark information to reorient themselves in large but not in small experimental spaces. We tested domestic chicks in the same task and found that they were able to conjoin geometric and nongeometric (landmark) information to reorient themselves in…

It has been proposed that infants can form global categories such as animate and inanimate objects (Mandler, 2004). The inductive generalization paradigm was used to examine inferences made by infants about the bodily, motion, and sensory capabilities of people and animals. In Experiment 1, 14-month-old infants generalized bodily and sensory…

Previous studies have demonstrated the sensitivity of chimpanzees to facial configurations. Three studies further these findings by showing this sensitivity to be specific to second-order relational properties. In humans, this type of configural processing requires prolonged experience and enables subordinate-level discriminations of many…

Two separate bodies of research suggest that young children have (a) a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose (e.g., Kelemen, 1999c) and (b) an orientation toward "creationist" accounts of natural entity origins whether or not they come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds (e.g., Evans, 2001). This…

Through associative learning, cues for biologically significant reinforcers such as food may gain access to mental representations of those reinforcers. Here, we used devaluation procedures, behavioral assessment of hedonic taste-reactivity responses, and measurement of immediate-early gene (IEG) expression to show that a cue for food engages…

Presents evidence that although patients with semantic deficits can sometimes show good performance on tests or object decisions, this pattern applies when nonsee-objects do not respect the regularities of the domain. Patients with semantic dementia viewed line drawings of a real and chimeric animals side-by-side and were asked to decide which was…

Drawing on the notion of the domain-specificity of recognition, reviews evidence on the effect of language in classification of and reasoning about categories from different domains. Looks at anthropological infant classification, and preschool categorization literature. Suggests the causal nature and indicative power of animal categories seem to…

A general learning impairment model and a reasoning insight model, both in rats, were reviewed for parallels to theories of human cognitive deficiency, leading to the conclusion that animal models of the cognitive deficiency states of mental retardation are underutilized and that human mental retardation researchers would benefit from greater…

Although researchers are exploring animals' capacity for monitoring their states of uncertainty, the use of some paradigms allows the criticism that animals map avoidance responses to error-causing stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored but because of feedback signals and stimulus aversion. The authors addressed this criticism with an…