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…

Because of the variability exhibited by individual animals' responses to their environment, studying animal behavior can be a wonderful way to engage students in self-directed, open-inquiry investigations. Individual animals react in ways that are a combination of instinct and learned behavior, but collectively they exhibit broader tendencies that…

This article seeks to contribute to the idea of "posthumanist education" by unfolding an educational situation where an assemblage of two humans and 33 former battery hens is gathered to carry out a so-called cognitive bias experiment for two days. A Deleuzian repertoire is set in motion to configure the dynamics of hens intervening in…

The reproducibility of experimental outcomes depends on consistent control of independent variables. In food-maintained operant performance, it is of utmost importance that the quantity of food delivered is reliable. To that end, some commercial food pellet dispensers have add-on attachments to sense the delivery of pellets. Not all companies,…

An inexpensive and automated method for presentation of olfactory or tactile stimuli in a two-choice task for rats was implemented with the use of a computer-controlled bidirectional motor. The motor rotated a disk that presented two stimuli of different texture for tactile discrimination, or different odor for olfactory discrimination. Because…

Dogs likely were the first animals to be domesticated and as such have shared a common environment with humans for over ten thousand years. Only recently, however, has this species' behavior been subject to scientific scrutiny. Most of this work has been inspired by research in human cognitive psychology and suggests that in many ways dogs are…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relative adequacy of the dry mouth vs. emotional theories of SIP using the desalivate rat. (Author)

Pairing a novel flavor with illness results in the conditioning of aversions to that flavor. This article reported a series of experiments examining the effect of several parameters of prior exposure to the illness on the acquisition of learned taste aversions. (Author/RK)

Does similarity in the location and temporal intensity pattern of the CS and UCS permit more rapid conditioning despite the presence of stimulus pairings in all groups? The following experiments attempt to assess the role of such factors in determining the rate of acquisition of a conditioned emotional response. (Author)

Aims at providing data for evaluating the proposition that associations between exteroceptive (outside) stimuli and illness play a role in determining the effect of unconditioned stimulus preexposure on subsequent taste aversion conditioning. (Author/RK)

Discusses four experiments concerned with environmental determiners of the taste familiarity effect. Specifically, external environmental stimulation experienced by the subject at the time of taste preexposure and taste conditioning was varied in order to assess its influence on taste aversion learning. (Author/RK)

The experiments reported here describe the relationships between the reflex-modulating effects of compounded stimuli and the effects of these stimuli when they act in isolation. (Author)

While incentive contrast has been reliably demonstrated in single-response situations, tests for contrast-of-choice behavior have invariably failed to obtain the effect. Three experiments were reported that eliminated features of prior methodology which can mask the effect. (Editor/RK)

The present research evaluated the refractorylike response decrement, as found in habituation of auditory evoked peripheral vasoconstriction in rabbits, to determine whether or not it represents a short-term habituation process distinct from effector fatigue or sensory adaptation. (Editor)

Using rats and pigeons as subjects, the effects of varying amounts of reinforcement on the rate and temporal patterns of interim and terminal behaviors engendered by periodic feeding schedules were assessed in three experiments. (Author/KC)