This study investigated outcome-selective Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) in fight-or-flight decision making. Participants learned to attack or retreat from monsters (instrumental phase) and to associate environments with specific monsters without responding (Pavlovian phase). In the transfer phase, they chose responses to unseen monsters…

When faced with the need to transform an object, idea, or situation, people have a tendency to favor adding new components rather than removing existing ones. This is called the "additive bias." Previous research, along with historical and anecdotal examples, shows that this bias may significantly reduce problem-solving abilities and…

Brand names are prevalent in our society: they influence consumption and future buying behaviour. As research has shown, children are also aware of brands and brand names, and brand names learned in childhood can influence their attitude towards the known brands. The collaboration of various scientific fields including pedagogy, psycholinguistics,…

Remote association, the ability to form new relations between independent elements, was assessed using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). The Chinese RAT (CRAT) includes the Chinese radical RAT (CRRAT), Chinese word RAT (CWRAT), and Chinese compound RAT (CCRAT). Behavioral research indicates that an individual's performance on the CRAT reflects…

Contextual stimulus control over instrumental drug-seeking behavior relies on the reconsolidation of context-response-drug associative memories into long-term memory storage following retrieval-induced destabilization. According to previous studies, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and dorsal hippocampus (DH) regulate cocaine-related memory…

Recent evidence demonstrated that dopamine within the nucleus accumbens mediates consolidation of both associative and nonassociative memories. However, the specific contribution of the nucleus accumbens subregions, core and shell, and of D1 and D2 receptors subtypes has not been yet clarified. The aim of this study was, therefore, to directly…

Despite the central status of avoidance in explaining the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, surprisingly little behavioral research has been conducted on human avoidance. In the present paper, first we provide a brief review of the empirical literature on avoidance. Next, we describe the implications of research on derived relational…

Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant's mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In…

This article reviews evidence and theories concerning the nature of stimulus representations in Pavlovian conditioning. It focuses on the elemental approach developed in stimulus sampling theory (R. C. Atkinson & W. K. Estes, 1963; R. R. Bush & F. Mosteller, 1951b) and extended by I. P. L. McLaren and N. J. Mackintosh (2000, 2002) and contrasts…