Recently, the study of biological function has been reaccepted as a legitimate focus of research in the field of animal learning. This "new" functionalism suffuses 2 distinct perspectives with which researchers approach the study of Pavlovian conditioning. Those who adopt the ecological perspective explore the role of conditioning within functional, naturally occurring categories of behavior, f...

This article provides supporting data for the research article "A simple automated system for appetitive conditioning of zebrafish in their home tanks" (J.M. Doyle, N. Merovitch, R.C. Wyeth, M.R. Stoyek, M. Schmidt, F. Wilfart, A. Fine, R.P. Croll, 2016) [1]. In that article, we described overall movements of zebrafish toward a food source as a response to auditory or visual cues as conditioned...

There has been debate about whether differential delay eyeblink conditioning can be acquired without awareness of the stimulus contingencies. In 4 experiments, the authors reexamined this question. Older participants were tested with a tone and white noise (Experiment 1) or with 2 tones (Experiment 2). In addition, younger participants were tested with 2 tones (Experiment 3) or with 2 tones plu...

Procedurally, learning has to occur in a context. Several lines of evidence suggest that contextual stimuli actively affect learning and expression of the conditional response. The experimental context can become associated with the unconditional stimulus (US), especially when the US is presented in a context in the absence of a discrete conditional stimulus (CS). Moreover, context can modulate...

When pigeons acquire a simple simultaneous discrimination, some of the value acquired by the S+ transfers to the S-. The mechanism underlying this transfer of value was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, pigeons trained on two simultaneous discriminations (A + B- and C +/- D-) showed a preference for B over D. This preference was reduced, however, following the devaluation of A. In...

Trace eyeblink conditioning (with a trace interval >/=500 msec) depends on the integrity of the hippocampus and requires that participants develop awareness of the stimulus contingencies (i.e., awareness that the conditioned stimulus [CS] predicts the unconditioned stimulus [US]). Previous investigations of the relationship between trace eyeblink conditioning and awareness of the stimulus conti...

A recurrent-network model provides a unified account of the hippocampal region in mediating the representation of temporal information in classical eyeblink conditioning. Much empirical research is consistent with a general conclusion that delay conditioning (in which the conditioned stimulus CS and unconditioned stimulus US overlap and co-terminate) is independent of the hippocampal system, wh...

In her commentary of Field (1999), Hammerl (1999) has drawn attention to several interesting points concerning the issue of contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning. First, she comments on several contentious issues arising from Field's review of the evaluative conditioning literature, second she critiques the data from his pilot study and finally she argues the case that EC is a distin...

Recent evidence shows that distractors that signal high compared to low reward availability elicit stronger attentional capture, even when this is detrimental for task-performance. This suggests that simply correlating stimuli with reward administration, rather than their instrumental relationship with obtaining reward, produces value-driven attentional capture. However, in previous studies, re...

The principle of the polarimetric imaging method called APSCI (Adapted Polarization State Contrast Imaging) is to maximize the polarimetric contrast between an object and its background using specific polarization states of illumination and detection. We perform here a comparative study of the APSCI method with existing Classical Mueller Imaging(CMI) associated with polar decomposition in the p...