Signaled active avoidance (SigAA) is the key experimental procedure for studying the acquisition of instrumental responses toward conditioned threat cues. Traditional analytic approaches (e.g., general linear model) often obfuscate important individual differences, although individual differences in learned responses characterize both animal and…

Studies investigating the development of memory processes and their neural substrates have flourished over the past two decades. The review by Jabès and Nelson (2015) adds an important piece to our understanding of the maturation of different elements and circuits within the hippocampal system and their association with the progressive development…

Presents Michael J. Meaney as one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (2012). Michael J. Meaney has taken the phenomenon of "handling" of newborn rats and opened a new area of investigation that has given new meaning to epigenetics via his work demonstrating transgenerational…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Friederike Range for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the complex social minds of nonhuman animals. Through ingenious experimental approaches,…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Angela J. Grippo for her creative contributions in investigating the association between depression and cardiovascular disease in preclinical animal models.…

Choice may be defined as the allocation of behavior among activities. Since all activities take up time, choice is conveniently thought of as the allocation of time among activities, even if activities like pecking are most easily measured by counting. Since dynamics refers to change through time, the dynamics of choice refers to change of…

Delay discounting is the decline in the present value of a reward with delay to its receipt. Across a variety of species, populations, and reward types, value declines hyperbolically with delay. Value declines steeply with shorter delays, but more shallowly with longer delays. Quantitative modeling provides precise measures to characterize the…

Charles Sherrington identified the properties of the synapse by purely behavioral means--the study of reflexes--more than 100 years ago. They were subsequently confirmed neurophysiologically. Studying reflex interaction, he also showed that activating one reflex often facilitates another, antagonistic one: "successive induction," which has since…

Since 1992 C. J. Rogers has lived with wolves and studied their societies at Raised by Wolves, a licensed, nonprofit research sanctuary situated in a high valley of New Mexico's Zuni Mountains, not far from the Four Corners. Rogers, who has taught at Northeastern Illinois University and Western New Mexico University, holds doctorates in both…

This article highlights a core lesson that has been used in a number of Lincoln Park Zoo educational programs. The lesson teaches students to conduct an ethological, or animal behavior, study on a bird. This study can be implemented in a variety of outdoor settings, including a park, schoolyard, or zoo. Using an ethogram, students will practice…

Contact or touch detectors in which a subject acts as a switch between two metal surfaces have proven more popular and arguably more useful for recording responses than capacitance switches, photocell detectors, and force detectors. Components for touch detectors circuits are inexpensive and, except for some special purpose designs, can be easily…

This article presents an introduction to "The Behavior-Analytic Origins of Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy: An Example of Behavioral Neurorehabilitation," by Edward Taub and his colleagues (Taub, 2012). Based on extensive experimentation with animal models of peripheral nerve injury, Taub and colleagues have created an approach to overcoming…

We summarize a series of bidirectional research studies that demonstrate the persistence-strengthening effects of differential reinforcement of alternative behavior on problem behavior. We model a possible solution to this problem with rats followed by replication with a human clinical population. The importance of coordinated basic and applied…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability of an individual to make inferences about what others may be thinking or feeling and to predict what they may do in a given situation based on those inferences. Discussions of ToM focus almost exclusively on inferred cognitive structures and processes and shed little light on the actual behaviors…

The authors propose a simple behavioral economic model (BEM) describing how reinforcement and interval timing interact. The model assumes a Weber-law-compliant logarithmic representation of time. Associated with each represented time value are the payoffs that have been obtained for each possible response. At a given real time, the response with…