Tolerance to effects of cocaine can be modulated by schedules of reinforcement. With multiple ratio schedules, research has shown an inverse relationship between ratio requirement and amount of tolerance that resulted from daily administration of the drug. In contrast, tolerance to the effects of cocaine on behavior under multiple interval…

Five experiments assessed associative symmetry in pigeons. In Experiments 1A, 1B and 2, pigeons learned two-alternative symbolic matching with identical sample- and comparison-response requirements and with matching stimuli appearing in all possible locations. Despite controlling for the nature of the functional stimuli and insuring all requisite…

The American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) was founded in 1982 as the result of a merger between the National Association for Public and Continuing Adult Education (NAPCAE) and the Adult Education Association (AEA). This prestigious association is dedicated to the belief that lifelong learning contributes to human…

The NMDA receptor (NMDAR) subunit GluN1 is an obligatory component of NMDARs without a known functional homolog and is expressed in almost every neuronal cell type. The NMDAR system is a coincidence detector with critical roles in spatial learning and synaptic plasticity. Its coincidence detection property is crucial for the induction of…

While there is convincing evidence that preverbal human infants and non-human primates can spontaneously represent number, considerable debate surrounds the possibility that such capacity is also present in other animals. Fish show a remarkable ability to discriminate between different numbers of social companions. Previous work has demonstrated…

J.M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello" is an overtly philosophical novel, at the heart of which are questions concerning the relation of human beings to animals and the discussion of animal rights. The nature of its subject matter and the prominence it gives to dialogue, sometimes of an almost Platonic kind, make it a rich potential…

The use of electronic instrumentation to monitor physiological function in conscious research animals and humans has become routine. Beyond basic research, animal studies using these methods are required by government regulatory agencies worldwide before human testing of potential new drugs. Living, as we do, in an age of miniaturized high-tech…

The regulation of gastric acid secretion has been the subject of investigation for over a century. Inhibition of gastrin-induced acid secretion by the intestine-derived hormone secretin provides a classic physiological example of negative feedback in the gastrointestinal tract. A classic paper by Leonard R. Johnson and Morton I. Grossman clearly…

This paper investigates the role of static and dynamic attributes for the animate-inanimate distinction in category-based reasoning of 7-month-olds. Three experiments tested infants' responses to movement events involving an unfamiliar animal and a ball. When either the animal or the ball showed self-initiated irregular movements (Experiment 1),…

This study investigated children's reasoning about and behavioral interactions with a computationally sophisticated robotic dog (Sony's AIBO) compared to a live dog (an Australian Shepherd). Seventy-two children from three age groups (7-9 years, 10-12 years, and 13-15 years) participated in this study. Results showed that more children…

The first year of college can be extremely stressful, especially for students residing on campus. Objective: The authors obtained information from college freshmen about their relationships with pets and investigated interest in a pet therapy program as social support for transient stressful periods. Participants: As part of a university…

Two studies examined whether nonreinforcement of a stimulus in multiple contexts, instead of a single context, would decrease renewal of conditioned fear in rats (as assessed by conditioned suppression of lever pressing). In Experiment 1, renewal was measured after 36 nonreinforced CS trials delivered during six extinction sessions in a single…

Several recent studies report that neurotransmitters that are critically involved in extinction in adult rats are not important for extinction in young rats. Specifically, pretest injection of the [gamma]-aminobutryic acid (GABA) receptor inverse agonist FG7142 has no effect on extinction in postnatal day (P)17 rats, although it reverses…

The role of the cerebellum in eyeblink conditioning is well established. Less work has been done to identify the necessary conditioned stimulus (CS) pathways that project sensory information to the cerebellum. A possible visual CS pathway has been hypothesized that consists of parallel inputs to the pontine nuclei from the lateral geniculate…

In four experiments, we investigated the effect of giving rats exposure to a distinctive environmental context before a phase of training in which an injection of LiCl was paired with that context. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were consistent with the possibility that such preexposure served to retard subsequent conditioning to the context…