Prior experience has been shown to improve learning in both humans and animals, but it is unclear what aspects of recent experience are necessary to produce beneficial effects. Here, we examined the capacity of rats with complete hippocampal lesions, restricted CA1 lesions, or sham surgeries to benefit from prior experience. Animals were tested in…

The trial-unique, delayed nonmatching-to-location (TUNL) task is a recently developed behavioral task that measures spatial working memory and a form of pattern separation in touchscreen-equipped operant conditioning chambers. Limited information exists regarding the neurotransmitters and neural substrates involved in the task. The present…

Behavioral flexibility is a cognitive process depending on prefrontal areas allowing adaptive responses to environmental changes. Serotonin transporter knockout (5-HTT[superscript -/-]) rodents show improved reversal learning in addition to orbitofrontal cortex changes. Another form of behavioral flexibility, extradimensional strategy set-shifting…

The dorsal hippocampus is crucial for mammalian spatial memory, but its exact role in item memory is still hotly debated. Recent evidence in humans suggested that the hippocampus might be selectively involved in item short-term memory to deal with an increasing memory load. In this study, we sought to test this hypothesis. To this aim we developed…

Objects are often remembered with their locations, which is an important aspect of event memory. Despite the well-known involvement of the hippocampus in event memory, detailed intrahippocampal mechanisms are poorly understood. In particular, no experimental evidence has been provided in support of the role of the dentate gyrus (DG) in…

In essentially every domain of neuroscience, the generally implicit assumption that few, if any, meaningful differences exist between male and female brain function is being challenged. Here we address how this development is influencing studies of the neurobiology of learning and memory. While it has been commonly held that males show an…

The activation of cAMP-responsive element-binding protein (CREB)-dependent gene expression is thought to be critical for the formation of different types of long-term memory. To explore the consequences of chronic enhancement of CREB function on spatial memory in mammals, we examined spatial navigation in bitransgenic mice that express in a…