Balancing habitual and deliberate forms of choice entails a comparison of their respective merits--the former being faster but inflexible, and the latter slower but more versatile. Here, we show that arbitration between these two forms of control can be derived from first principles within an Active Inference scheme. We illustrate our arguments…

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) play an essential role in episodic memory, and accumulating evidence indicates that two MTL subregions--the perirhinal (PRc) and parahippocampal (PHc) cortices--might have different functions. According to the binding of item and context theory ( [16] and [21]), PRc is involved in processing item information, the…

Associative conditioning in "Drosophila melanogaster" has been well documented for several decades. However, most studies report only simple associations of conditioned stimuli (CS, e.g., odor) with unconditioned stimuli (US, e.g., electric shock) to measure learning or establish memory. Here we describe a straightforward second-order conditioning…

New granule cells are born throughout life in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampal formation. Given the fundamental role of the hippocampus in processes underlying certain forms of learning and memory, it has been speculated that newborn granule cells contribute to cognition. However, previous strategies aiming to causally link newborn neurons…

Brewin's dual representation theory, Ehlers and Clark's cognitive appraisal model, and Dalgleish's schematic, propositional, analogue and associative representational systems model are considered in the light of recent evidence on the neural substrates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The models' proposals about the cognitive mechanism of…

We studied the roles of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in learning and relearning to inhibit context conditioned fear (freezing) in extinction. In Experiment 1, pre-extinction BLA infusion of the NMDA receptor (NMDAr) antagonist, ifenprodil, impaired the development and retention of inhibition but…