There are significant sex differences in vulnerability to develop fear-related anxiety disorders. Females exhibit twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as males and sex differences have been observed in fear extinction learning in both humans and rodents, with a failure to inhibit fear emerging as a precipitating factor in the…

Memories relating to a painful, negative event are adaptive and can be stored for a lifetime to support preemptive avoidance, escape, or attack behavior. However, under unfavorable circumstances such memories can become overwhelmingly powerful. They may trigger excessively negative psychological states and uncontrollable avoidance of locations,…

The retrosplenial cortex supports navigation, with one role thought to be the integration of different spatial cue types. This hypothesis was extended by examining the integration of nonspatial cues. Rats with lesions in either the dysgranular subregion of retrosplenial cortex (area 30) or lesions in both the granular and dysgranular subregions…

Extinction is the reduction in drug seeking when the contingency between drug seeking behavior and the delivery of drug reward is broken. Here, we investigated a role for the nucleus accumbens shell (AcbSh). Rats were trained to respond for 4% (v/v) alcoholic beer in one context (Context A) followed by extinction in a second context (Context B).…

Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional…

Behavioral extinction is an active form of new learning involving the prediction of nonreward where reward has previously been present. The expression of extinction learning can be disrupted by the presentation of reward itself or reward-predictive stimuli (reinstatement) as well as the passage of time (spontaneous recovery) or contextual changes…

Rats were able to search multiple food cups in a foraging task and successfully return to a fixed, but not a variable, start location. Reducing the number of food cups to be searched resulted in an improvement in performance in the variable start condition. Performance was better when only one or two food cups had to be visited but was still…

In this study, three lines of evidence suggest a role for [alpha][subscript 2]-adrenoreceptors in rat pup odor-preference learning: olfactory bulb infusions of the [alpha][subscript 2]-antagonist, yohimbine, prevents learning; the [alpha][subscript 2]-agonist, clonidine, paired with odor, induces learning; and subthreshold clonidine paired with…

In humans and in animals, mental schemas can store information within an associative framework that enables rapid and efficient assimilation of new information. Using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task, we now report that the anterior cingulate cortex is part of a neocortical network of schema storage with NMDA receptor-mediated…

The goal of this research was to determine the effects of [beta]-adrenergic antagonism in the IC before or after inhibitory avoidance (IA) training or context pre-exposure in a latent inhibition protocol. Pretraining intra-IC infusion of the [beta]-adrenergic antagonist propranolol disrupted subsequent IA retention and impaired latent inhibition…

Apolipoprotein receptors belong to an evolutionarily conserved surface receptor family that has intimate roles in the modulation of synaptic plasticity and is necessary for proper hippocampal-dependent memory formation. The known lipoprotein receptor ligand Reelin is important for normal synaptic plasticity, dendritic morphology, and cognitive…

In three experiments, rats received exposure to a sucrose solution followed by conditioning with a neutral flavor as the conditioned stimulus (CS) and sucrose as the unconditioned stimulus (US). In Experiments 1 and 2, some rats were given both the preexposure and the conditioning phases in a highly familiar context (the homecage), whereas other…

Amygdala activity mediates the acquisition and consolidation of emotional experiences; we have recently shown that post-acquisition reactivation of this structure is necessary for the long-term storage of conditioned taste aversion (CTA). However, the specific neurotransmitters involved in such reactivation are not known. The aim of the present…

Songbirds and humans share many parallels in vocal learning and auditory sequence processing. However, the two groups differ notably in their abilities to recognize acoustic sequences shifted in absolute pitch (pitch height). Whereas humans maintain accurate recognition of words or melodies over large pitch height changes, songbirds are…

This paper is based on educational anthropology, and presents the initial findings of a three-year international comparative study of primary school children's learning-processes during travel and cross-cultural encounters. A French-German research team investigated and here reports on primary school exchange programmes. Open coding of the…