Fruit flies can learn to associate an odor with an aversive stimulus, such as a shock. New findings indicate that disrupting the expression of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in flies impairs olfactory conditioning. The findings provide support for a critical role for NMDA receptors in associative learning.

We consider the problem of learning associative mixtures for classification and regression problems, where the output is modeled as a mixture of conditional distributions, conditioned on the input. In contrast to approaches such as expectation maximization (EM) or variational Bayes, which can get stuck in bad local optima, we present a tensor decomposition method which is guaranteed to correctl...

Research on lexical development in Down syndrome (DS) has emphasized a dissociation between language comprehension and production abilities, with production of words being relatively more impaired than comprehension. Current theories stress the role of associative learning on lexical development. However, there have been no attempts to explain the atypical lexical development in DS based on aty...

This work reviews research on neural mechanisms of two types of associative learning in the marine mollusk Aplysia, classical conditioning of the gill- and siphon-withdrawal reflex and operant conditioning of feeding behavior. Basic classical conditioning is caused in part by activity-dependent facilitation at sensory neuron-motor neuron (SN-MN) synapses and involves a hybrid combination of act...

Ramscar and colleagues (2010, this volume) describe the "feature-label-order" (FLO) effect on category learning and characterize it as a constraint on symbolic learning. I argue that FLO is neither a constraint on symbolic learning in the sense of "learning elements of a symbol system" (instead, it is an effect on nonsymbolic, association learning) nor is it, more than any other constraint on c...

Propositional models of associative learning postulate that the behavioral impact of regularities in the presence of two events is mediated by the formation of propositions about the relation between these events. Because the mere statistical contingency between events often does not provide enough information to infer the nature of the relation between those events (e.g., whether one event is ...

In tasks of associative learning, animals establish new links between unrelated items by using information about trial outcome to strengthen correct/rewarded associations and modify incorrect/unrewarded ones. To study how hippocampal neurons convey information about reward and trial outcome during new associative learning, we recorded hippocampal neurons as monkeys learned novel object-place as...

Associative learning has been meticulously studied in many species, and diverse effects have been explained using a handful of basic assumptions and mechanisms. Human language acquisition proceeds remarkably quickly and is of great interest, but is arguably more difficult to capture under the microscope. Nonetheless, empirical investigations have led researchers to theorize a variety of languag...

In this article we revisit the classical neuroscience paradigm of Hebbian learning. We find that it is difficult to achieve effective associative memory storage by Hebbian synaptic learning, since it requires network-level information at the synaptic level or sparse coding level. Effective learning can yet be achieved even with nonsparse patterns by a neuronal process that maintains a zero sum ...