Different theoretical approaches to word learning and categorization recognize importance of attentional flexibility, however they assume different mechanisms underlying this flexibility. According to one approach, attentional shifts in the course of word learning and categorization are automatic in nature. According to the alternative approach, these shifts may arise as a result of voluntary p...

What do infants learn when they learn to sit upright? We tested behavioral flexibility in learning to sit-the ability to adapt posture to changes in the environment-in 6- to 9-month-old infants sitting on forward and backward slopes. Infants began with slant at 0°; then slant increased in 2° increments until infants lost balance. Infants kept balance on impressively steep slopes, especially in ...

Fundamental to behavior is the capacity to distinguish beneficial from detrimental environmental stimuli. In this issue of Neuron, a new study by Morrison et al. shows that underlying these processes are qualitatively different dynamical interactions between brain structures involved in processing the value of environmental stimuli.

Flexibility of associative learning can be revealed by establishing and then reversing cue-outcome discriminations. Here, we used functional MRI to examine whether neurobehavioral correlates of reversal-learning are impaired in White and Asian volunteers when initial learning involves fear-conditioning to a racial out-group. For one group, the picture of a Black male was initially paired with s...

The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels consisting of the same syllable produced with dist...

In the basal ganglia, inputs from the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are transmitted through both direct and indirect pathways and control reward-based learning. In the NAc, dopamine (DA) serves as a key neurotransmitter, modulating these two parallel pathways. This study explored how reward learning and its flexibility are controlled in a pathway-specific and DA receptor-dependent manner. We used two...

Cognitive flexibility is an important goal in the computational modeling of higher cognition. An agent operating in the world that changes over time should adapt to the changes and update its knowledge according to them. In this paper, we report our progress on implementing a constraint-based mechanism for learning from failures in a cognitive architecture, ICARUS. We review relevant features o...

We have done the best we can to explain this newly emerging source of education on this page and have various links to the top Australian universities that offer online education. eLearning stands for Electronic Learning and it is defined as the method by which a student and a professor use online programs and technology to interact with each other. The main point is that there is no physical i...