the purpose of the present study was to determine the role of medial prefrontal cortex (mpfc) dopaminergic system in fear conditioning response considering individual differences. animals were initially counterbalanced and classified based on open field test, and then were given a single infusion of the dopamine agonist, amphetamine (amph) and antagonist, clozapine (clz) into the medial prefron...

Social learning strategies (SLSs) are rules specifying the conditions in which it would be adaptive for animals to copy the behaviour of others rather than to persist with a previously established behaviour or to acquire a new behaviour through asocial learning. In behavioural ecology, cultural evolutionary theory and economics, SLSs are studied using a 'phenotypic gambit'-from a purely functio...

Eyeblink classical conditioning is a relatively simple form of associative learning that has become an invaluable tool in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of learning. When studying rabbits in this paradigm, we observed a dramatic modification of learning rate by conducting training during episodes of either hippocampal theta or hippocampal non-theta activity as determined by on-line ...

In this reply, the authors explore several issues raised by I. Kirsch (2004) concerning their original article (S. Stewart-Williams & J. Podd, 2004), which dealt with the roles of expectancy and classical conditioning in the placebo effect. The only notable disagreement concerns a definitional issue, namely, Stewart-Williams and Podd’s claim that the placebo concept can be extended to inert psy...

Perceived availability of a substance has been proposed to play a role in cue reactivity by both traditional classical conditioning models and S. T. Tiffany's (1990) cognitive processing model (CPM) of substance use. This study investigated the role of availability information on alcohol cue reactivity. Subjects were 134 heavy drinkers in a 2 x 2 between-subjects design, crossing cues (alcohol ...

We frame behavior in classical conditioning experiments as the product of normative statistical inference. According to this theory, animals learn an internal model of their environment from experience. The basic building blocks of this internal model are latent causes—explanatory constructs inferred by the animal that partition observations into coherent clusters. Generalization of conditioned...

A long-running debate in the literature on conditioning in humans focuses on the question of whether conditioned responses are the product of automatic link formation processes governed by the standard laws of simple associative learning, or the consequence of participants' inferences about the relationships between the 2 related events, E1 and E2, which would lead E1 to generate a conscious ex...

The effects of stimulus controllability on latent inhibition was examined in instrumental and classical conditioning. Rats allowed control over stimulus termination prior to avoidance conditioning exhibited no retardation of avoidance learning whereas subjects yoked to these rats with respect to pattern and amount of stimulus exposure but given no control over stimulus termination were retarded...

We have used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize neural responses associated with emotional learning. Employing a classical conditioning paradigm in which faces were conditioned by pairing with an aversive tone (US), we compared responses evoked by conditioned (CS+) and nonconditioned (CS-) stimuli. Pairing 50% of the CS+ with the US enabled us to constrai...

In 2 experiments, separate groups of rats were given stimulus conditioning, temporal conditioning, untreated control and (in Experiment 2) learned irrelevance control procedures, followed by a compound with both stimulus and temporal cues. Stimulus conditioning consisted of a random 15-s duration conditioned stimulus (CS) followed by food; temporal conditioning consisted of food-food intervals ...