Prior work has shown that systemic cocaine pretreatment augments cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP) in rats. In contrast, ghrelin receptor antagonism attenuates cocaine and amphetamine-induced CPP. In order to further investigate ghrelin's role in dopamine-mediated reward, the present report examined whether pretreament with ghrelin, administered directly into the ventral tegmental area...

Blocking is a classical conditioning task in which prior training to one cue such as a tone reduces learning about a second cue such as a light, when subsequently trained as a tone-light compound. Blocking has been theorized to come about through a US-modulated error correction mechanism by Rescorla & Wagner (1972) as well as through a mechanism of learned inattention as theorized by Mackintosh...

Five experiments with rat subjects compared the effects of immediate and delayed extinction on the durability of extinction learning. Three experiments examined extinction of fear conditioning (using the conditioned emotional response method), and two experiments examined extinction of appetitive conditioning (using the food-cup entry method). In all experiments, conditioning and extinction wer...

Background and Objective: Ethanol has undesirable effects on memory and synaptic communication. However, its impact on the learned spatial memory is unclear. We investigated the damaging effects of ethanol on place neurons of rat’s hippocampal CA1.Materials and Methods: Sixty four male Wistar rats (250 g) were administered high (1-8 g/kg) or low (0.05-0.1 g/kg) doses of ethanol intraperit...