The sounds of birds form the outdoor playlist of our lives. Birds appeal to the public, in part because of the wide variety of interesting sounds they make. This popularity has led to a long history of amateur participation in ornithology, which has recently produced rapid increases in freely available online databases with hundreds of thousands…

Questions about the conscious, conative and cognitive life, as well as the status and treatment of other-than-animals have been receiving systematic consideration by philosophers for close to 50 years. It is all the more puzzling, then, that it is only in recent years that these issues have been addressed by educational philosophers and scholars…

The present study evaluates the updating of long-term memory for duration. After learning a temporal discrimination associating one lever with a standard duration (4 sec) and another lever with both a shorter (1-sec) and a longer (16-sec) duration, rats underwent a single session for learning a new standard duration. The temporal generalization…

Despite growing evidence of many environmental and other problems being caused by industrialized meat production, the issue of meat consumption is still generally seen as a private affair that has nothing to do with politics or education. This article problematizes meat consumption and discusses transformative learning theory in the light of the…

Cognitive flexibility refers to various processes which enable behaviors to be modified on the basis of a change in the contingencies between stimuli or responses and their associated outcomes. Reversal learning is a form of cognitive flexibility which measures the ability to adjust responding based on a switch in the stimulus--outcome…

In this paper we discuss some literature relating to episodic memory, future episodic thinking and mental time travel in humans and non-human animals. We discuss the concept of mental time travel and argue that the concept relies on subjective phenomena such as consciousness and on this basis is not useful when studying episodic memory and future…

In the lesson on which this practical article is based, third grade students constructed a "lift-the-flap" page to explore food webs on the prairie. The moveable papercraft focused student attention on prairie animals' external structures and how the inferred functions of those structures could support further inferences about the…

In humans and in animals, mental schemas can store information within an associative framework that enables rapid and efficient assimilation of new information. Using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task, we now report that the anterior cingulate cortex is part of a neocortical network of schema storage with NMDA receptor-mediated…

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 Laurie R. Santos for creative and insightful investigations of cognition across a broad range of species and psychological domains, illuminating cognitive…

This article introduces a novel hypothesis regarding amygdala function in psychopathy. The first part of this article introduces the concept of psychopathy and describes the main cognitive and affective impairments demonstrated by this population; that is, a deficit in fear-recognition, lower conditioned fear responses and poor performance in…

We report here that ZIP, a selective inhibitor of the atypical protein kinase C isoform PKM[zeta], abolishes very long-term conditioned taste aversion (CTA) associations in the insular cortex of the behaving rat, at least 3 mo after encoding. The effect of ZIP is not replicated by a general serine/threonine protein kinase inhibitor that is…

Neuronal activity regulated pentraxin (Narp) is a secreted protein that regulates [alpha]-amino-3-hydroxyl-5-methyl-4-isoxazole-propionate receptors (AMPAR) aggregation and synaptogenesis. Mapping of Narp-positive neurons in brain has revealed it is prominently expressed in several limbic system projection pathways. Consistent with this…

Metaphorical cognition arises from the mapping of two conceptual domains onto each other. According to the "Anthropocentrism", people tend to know the world first by learning about their bodies including Apparatuses. Based on that, people begin to know the material world, and the human body part metaphorization emerges as the times…

A test of advanced theory of mind (ToM), first introduced by F. Happe (1994), was adapted for children (mental, human, animal, and nature stories plus unlinked sentences). These materials were closely matched for difficulty and were presented to forty-five 7- to 12-year-olds with autism and 27 control children. Children with autism who showed ToM…

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…