Pavlovian conditioning underlies many aspects of pain behavior, including fear and threat detection [1], escape and avoidance learning [2], and endogenous analgesia [3]. Although a central role for the amygdala is well established [4], both human and animal studies implicate other brain regions in learning, notably ventral striatum and cerebellum [5]. It remains unclear whether these regions ma...

Money is a secondary reinforcer commonly used across a range of disciplines in experimental paradigms investigating reward learning and decision-making. The effectiveness of monetary reinforcers during aversive learning and associated neural basis, however, remains a topic of debate. Specifically, it is unclear if the initial acquisition of aversive representations of monetary losses depends on...

Decision-making often involves using sensory cues to predict possible rewarding or punishing reinforcement outcomes before selecting a course of action. Recent work has revealed complexity in how the brain learns to predict rewards and punishments. Analysis of neural signaling during and after learning in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, two brain areas that process appetitive and aversiv...

Prior studies have demonstrated that differences in activation of the defensive motivational system - as indexed by cardiac responses to the CS+ during aversive conditioning - are related to differences in the acquisition of two-levels-of-learning: cognitive (contingency learning) and emotional (fear learning). Here we further explored these differences using an independent psychophysiological ...

The identification of premorbid markers of risk for psychopathology is one of the most important challenges for present-day psychiatric research. This study focuses on behavioral vulnerability factors that contribute to the development of anxiety. Little is known about the role of aversive learning and generalization in the development of pathological anxiety. In this study, a large student sam...

Dopaminergic neurons provide value signals in mammals and insects. During Drosophila olfactory learning, distinct subsets of dopaminergic neurons appear to assign either positive or negative value to odor representations in mushroom body neurons. However, it is not known how flies evaluate substances that have mixed valence. Here we show that flies form short-lived aversive olfactory memories w...

Feedback mechanisms in operant learning are critical for animals to increase reward or reduce punishment. However, not all conditions have a behavior that can readily resolve an event. Animals must then try out different behaviors to better their situation through outcome learning. This form of learning allows for novel solutions and with positive experience can lead to unexpected behavioral ro...

Money is a secondary reinforcer that acquires its value through social communication and interaction. In everyday human behavior and laboratory studies, money has been shown to influence appetitive or reward learning. It is unclear, however, if money has a similar impact on aversive learning. The goal of this study was to investigate the efficacy of money in aversive learning, comparing it with...

Chronic stress has been shown to impact learning, but studies have been sparse or nonexistent examining sex or task differences. We examined the effects of sex and chronic stress on instrumental learning in adult rats. Rats were tested in an aversive paradigm with or without prior appetitive experience, and daily body weight data was collected as an index of stress. Relative to control animals,...