Two experiments examined the outcome specificity of a learned predictiveness effect in human causal learning. Experiment 1 indicated that prior experience of a cue-outcome relation modulates learning about that cue with respect to a different outcome from the same affective class but not with respect to an outcome from a different affective class. Experiment 2 ruled out an interpretation of thi...

Recent decades have witnessed tremendous advances in the neuroscience of emotion, learning and memory, and in animal models for understanding depression and anxiety. This review focuses on new rationally designed psychiatric treatments derived from preclinical human and animal studies. Nonpharmacological treatments that affect disrupted emotion circuits include vagal nerve stimulation, rapid tr...

Like humans, songbirds are one of the few animal groups that learn vocalization. Vocal learning requires coordination of auditory input and vocal output using auditory feedback to guide one’s own vocalizations during a specific developmental stage known as the critical period. Songbirds are good animal models for understand the neural basis of vocal learning, a complex form of imitation, becaus...

Research on learning has for historical reasons been divided mainly into behaviourally oriented studies performed on animals and more cognitively oriented studies in humans (Anderson, 2000). Accordingly, studies aimed at the presumed neurophysiological basis of learning have either exploited the full range of cognitive-phenomenological approaches in humans while being methodologically confined ...

Horses have been domesticated in between 2.500 and 5.000 (Clutton-Brock, 1981) years ago, ever since humans tried to train them for fast and correct responses to special tasks. In this sense it appears to be important to gain more insight in equine learning abilities. Murphy and Arkins (2006) succeeded to write a comprehensive and very useful review on equine learning behaviour. Animal learning...

To adapt to an ever-changing environment, animals consolidate some, but not all, learning experiences to long-term memory. In mammals, long-term memory consolidation often involves neural pathway reactivation hours after memory acquisition. It is not known whether this delayed-reactivation schema is common across the animal kingdom or how information is stored during the delay period. Here, we ...