A fundamental property of extinction is that the behavior that is suppressed during extinction can be unmasked through a number of postextinction procedures. Of the commonly studied unmasking procedures (spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, contextual renewal, and rapid reacquisition), rapid reacquisition is the only approach that allows a direct…

Contextual stimulus control over instrumental drug-seeking behavior relies on the reconsolidation of context-response-drug associative memories into long-term memory storage following retrieval-induced destabilization. According to previous studies, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and dorsal hippocampus (DH) regulate cocaine-related memory…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is not a unitary process. At the neurobiological level multiple brain regions and neurotransmitters contribute to fear learning. At the behavioral level many variables contribute to fear learning including the physical salience of the events being learned about, the direction and magnitude of predictive error, and the…

The effects of prenatal choline availability on Pavlovian conditioning were assessed in adult male rats (3-4 mo). Neither supplementation nor deprivation of prenatal choline affected the acquisition and extinction of simple Pavlovian conditioned excitation, or the acquisition and retardation of conditioned inhibition. However, prenatal choline…

Lesions of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) have long been associated with abnormalities of taste-related behaviors and with failure in a variety of taste- and odor-related learning paradigms, including taste-potentiated odor aversion, conditioned taste preference, and conditioned taste aversion. Still, the general role of the amygdala in…

How the nervous system encodes learning and memory processes has interested researchers for 100 years. Over this span of time, a number of basic neuroscience methods has been developed to explore the relationship between learning and the brain, including brain lesion, stimulation, pharmacology, anatomy, imaging, and recording techniques. In this…