Two experiments assessed the effects of extinguishing a conditioned cue on subsequent context conditioning. Each experiment used a different video-game method where sensors predicted attacking spaceships and participants responded to the sensor in a way that prepared them for the upcoming attack. In Experiment 1 extinction of a cue which signaled…

Generalization of fear can involve abnormal responding to cues that signal safety and is common in people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Differential auditory fear conditioning can be used as a tool to measure changes in fear discrimination and generalization. Most prior work in this area has focused on elevated amygdala activity…

Individuals with anxiety disorders often do not respond to safety signals and hence continue to be afraid and anxious. Consequently, it is important to develop paradigms in animals that can directly study brain systems involved in learning about, and responding to, safety signals. We previously developed a discrimination procedure in rats of the…

Learning to discriminate between spatial locations defined by two adjacent arms of a radial maze in the conditioned cue preference paradigm requires two kinds of information: latent spatial learning when the rats explore the maze with no food available, and learning about food availability in two spatial locations when the rats are then confined…

This experiment assesses spatial and nonspatial relational memory in freely moving 9-mo-old and adult (11-13-yr-old) macaque monkeys ("Macaca mulatta"). We tested the use of proximal landmarks, two different objects placed at the center of an open-field arena, as conditional cues allowing monkeys to predict the location of food rewards hidden in…

When an odor is paired with a delayed illness, rats acquire a relatively weak odor aversion. In contrast, rats develop a strong aversion to an olfactory cue paired with delayed illness if it is presented simultaneously with a gustatory cue. Such a conditioning effect has been referred to as taste-potentiated odor aversion learning (TPOA). TPOA is…