Actions become compulsive when they are no longer controlled by their consequences. Compulsivity can be assessed using the omission procedure in which animals are required to withhold a previously reinforced action to earn reward. The current study tested the hypothesis that inactivation of the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), a structure implicated in habitual behavior, can enhance sensitivity to ...

In the conditioned magazine approach paradigm, rats are exposed to a contingent relationship between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the delivery of food (the unconditioned stimulus, US). As the rats learn the CS-US association, they make frequent anticipatory head entries into the food magazine (the conditioned response, CR) during the CS. Conventionally, this is considered to be a Pavlovian p...

Abstract Controllability over stressors has major impacts on brain and behavior. In humans, however, the effect of controllability responses to is poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated how altered a shock-plus-sound stressor with between-group yoked design, where participants in controllable uncontrollable groups experienced matched exposure. Emp...

Performance feedback during learning is accompanied by a negative event-related potentials (ERP) component, the feedback-related negativity (FRN), which codes a reward prediction error. An open issue relates to the coding of feedback stimuli in observational learning. The present study aimed to determine differences in the neural processing of feedback in active and observational learners in a ...

The present study examined whether the learning of exercise routines would be enhanced by giving participants an incidental choice (i.e., exercise order). Two groups of participants were asked to perform three balance exercises. After watching a demonstration of each exercise, a choice group was allowed to choose the order of exercises, while yoked control group participants performed them in t...

Studies examining feedback in educational settings have largely focused on feedback that is received, rather than chosen, by students. This study investigates whether adult participants learn more from choosing rather than receiving feedback from virtual characters in a digital poster design task. We employed a yoked study design and two versions of an online game-based assessment, Posterlet, t...