This series of experiments used rats to compare counterconditioning and extinction of conditioned fear responses (freezing) with respect to the effects of a context shift. In each experiment, a stimulus was paired with shock in context A, extinguished or counterconditioned through pairings with sucrose in context B, and then tested for renewal…

The adoption of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been growing as an effective approach to facilitating second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) acquisition. Existing literature implementing CMC has investigated the efficacy of various devices, including video conferencing, emails, and virtual worlds. Nevertheless, few studies have…

Response inhibition is crucial for mental and physical health but studies assessing the trainability of this type of inhibition are rare. Thirty-nine children aged 10-12 years and 46 adults aged 18-24 years were assigned to an adaptive go/no-go inhibition training condition or an active control condition. Transfer of training effects to…

An alternating treatments design with a control condition was used to evaluate and compare the effects of two taped-problem interventions on addition fact fluency. Both taped-problem interventions were identical with the exception of the time delay between the auditory cue of the problem and the answer. One condition used a 2-s delay and the other…

We have investigated the effect of protein kinase Mzeta (PKM[zeta]) inhibition in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) upon the retention of a nonspatial learned active avoidance response and conditioned taste-aversion (CTA) acquisition in rats. ZIP (10 nmol/[mu]L) injected into the BLA 24 h after training impaired retention of a learned…

Three-month-old Cameroonian Nso farmer and German middle-class infants were compared regarding learning and retention in a computerized mobile task. Infants achieving a preset learning criterion during reinforcement were tested for immediate and long-term retention measured in terms of an increased response rate after reinforcement and after a…

The hippocampus and the basal ganglia are thought to play fundamental and distinct roles in learning and memory, supporting two dissociable memory systems. Interestingly, however, the hippocampus and the basal ganglia have each, separately, been implicated as necessary for reversal learning--the ability to adaptively change a response when…

Contemporary theories of Pavlovian conditioning propose a distinction between signal learning (SL), in which a conditioned stimulus (CS) becomes a predictor for a biologically significant unconditioned stimulus (US), and evaluative learning (EL), in which the valence of the US is transferred to the CS. This distinction is based largely on the…

Learning difficulties in preterm infants are thought to reflect impairment in arousal regulation. We examined relationships among gestational age, learning speed, and behavioral and physiological reactivity in 55 preterm and 49 full-term infants during baseline, contingency, and nonreinforcement phases of a conjugate mobile paradigm at 3 months…

Selective attention was assessed in second, fourth, and sixth grade reflective and impulsive children with an incidental learning task using pictures (animal-household object pairs) or shapes (colored forms) as stimuli. By the sixth grade, reflective children displayed less incidental learning and greater central learning than impulsive children…

An assessment was made of 5- and 8-year-old children's performance on a short-term memory task under two auditory and two visual distraction conditions, as well as under a nondistraction condition. Performance under nondistraction was found to be superior to that under distraction (p<.001), indicating that the extraneous stimuli had a generally…

Author critically comments on D.W. Hamlyn's work on human learning which borrows from the classical philosophies of rationalism and empiricism. These lack a proper biological perspective for man and an adequate appreciation of man's social nature. The author discusses animal-like instinctive behavior and specifically social learning. For journal…

One initial and two follow-up experiments were conducted to test social comparison predictions regarding influence processes related to risk taking in groups. Subjects were 137 male and female college students. (MP)