We describe a fully automated, live-in 24/7 test environment, with experimental protocols that measure the accuracy and precision with which mice match the ratio of their expected visit durations to the ratio of the incomes obtained from two hoppers, the progress of instrumental and classical conditioning (trials-to-acquisition), the accuracy and precision of interval timing, the effect of rela...

BACKGROUND Visual images may be judged 'aesthetic' when their positioning appears imbalanced. An apparent imbalance may signify an as yet incomplete action or event requiring more detailed processing. As such it may refer to phylogenetically ancient stimulus-response mechanisms such as those mediating attentional deployment. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We studied preferences for structural...

Anticipatory Nausea (AN) is a severe side effect of chemotherapy that can lead cancer patients to discontinue their treatment. This kind of nausea is usually elicited by the re-exposure of the patients to the clinical context they need to attend to be treated. There has been considerable agreement that AN represents a paradigmatic example of Pavlovian conditioning, and within this framework, se...

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This study addresses the relationship between aging and experience-dependent plasticity in the mouse somatosensory cortex. Plasticity in the cortical representation of vibrissae (whiskers) was investigated in young (3 months), mature (14 months) and old (2 years) mice using [14C]2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) autoradiography. Plastic changes were evoked using two experimental paradigms. The deprivation-...

By recording neuromagnetic events during aversive classical conditioning, we examined the extinction of a previously described conditioned response. Averaging over non-reinforced exposures to the conditioned stimulus revealed magnetic activity in the secondary somatosensory and insular cortices, appearing between 110 and 140 ms after the omitted unconditioned electric shock. We suggest this act...

Pavlov's contribution to experimental psychology was to invent a technique that allowed him to undertake a prolonged and systematic series of well-controlled experiments that, astonishingly enough, uncovered many if not most of the phenomena of what is rightly called pavlovian conditioning. It was not for another 30 years or more that English-speaking psychologists began to match that achieveme...

A new technique of enhancement of heterosexual responsiveness is described. This uses a classical conditioning paradigm with heterosexual photographic material as the CS and erections elicited by a vibrator as the UCS. A 44-year-old fetishist was treated in this manner. His response to treatment was favorable and details of change are presented. The timing of physiological and diary measure cha...

Classical Hebbian learning puts the emphasis on joint pre- and postsynaptic activity, but neglects the potential role of neuromodulators. Since neuromodulators convey information about novelty or reward, the influence of neuromodulators on synaptic plasticity is useful not just for action learning in classical conditioning, but also to decide "when" to create new memories in response to a flow ...

We used a fully automated system for the behavioural measurement of physiologically meaningful properties of basic mechanisms of cognition to test two strains of heterozygous mutant mice, Bfc (batface) and L1, and their wild-type littermate controls. Both of the target genes are involved in the establishment and maintenance of synapses. We find that the Bfc heterozygotes show reduced precision ...