Pervasive avoidance is one of the central symptoms of all anxiety-related disorders. In treatment, avoidance behaviors are typically discouraged because they are assumed to maintain anxiety. Yet, it is not clear if engaging in avoidance is always detrimental. In this study, we used a platform-mediated avoidance task to investigate the influence of…

Recent data reveal that the thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) has a critical role in the extinction of conditioned fear. Muscimol (MUS) infusions into the RE impair within-session extinction of conditioned freezing and result in poor long-term extinction memories in rats. Although this suggests that RE inactivation impairs extinction learning, it is…

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Recently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants…

Presenting a pictorial representation followed by a textual representation supports learners to build a coherent mental model. Providing an elaboration prompt stimulates learners to process the learning content semantically. Hence, combining both approaches might result in synergetic effects as both foster mental model development, which could be…

Iterated language learning experiments that explore the emergence of linguistic structure in the laboratory vary considerably in methodological implementation, limiting the generalizability of findings. Most studies also restrict themselves to exploring the emergence of combinatorial and compositional structure in isolation. Here, we use a novel…

Dysfunctions in memory recall lead to pathological fear; a hallmark of trauma-related disorders, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both, heightened recall of an association between a cue and trauma, as well as impoverished recall that a previously trauma-related cue is no longer a threat, result in a debilitating fear toward the cue.…

Structural patterns existing in language can be exploited for implicit prediction of sequences in speech and visual input via a process termed statistical learning (SL). Despite extensive examination of SL in dyslexia, whether SL problems arise from modality-constrained learning processes or from global learning processes is still unknown, nor is…

Research has shown that novel words can be learned through the mechanism of statistical or cross-situational word learning (CSWL). So far, CSWL studies using adult populations have focused on the presentation of spoken words. However, words can also be learned through their written form. This study compared auditory and orthographic presentations…

Purpose: Impairments in statistical learning abilities of individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) have been demonstrated in word segmentation and in visual artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, but so far, little attention has been devoted to the AGL abilities of this population in the acoustic verbal domain. This study aimed to test…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or…

The purpose of this study was to investigate sub-lexical segmentation in Spanish-speaking children based on the perception of regular syllables (pseudomorphemes), as well as their association with a visual referent. Both of these skills are the precursors to learning morphology for language acquisition. Twenty-three 12-month-old children…

When Virtual Reality (VR) is used to present learning content, the three-dimensional image is often not sufficient and additional text is required, either in the form of visual or auditory text. Such additional instructional text could be particularly beneficial due to the many visual stimuli and the risk of visual working memory overload.…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

To build knowledge, separate yet related learning episodes can be integrated with one another and then used to derive new knowledge. Separate episodes are often experienced through different formats, such as text passages and graphic representations. Accordingly, in the present research, we tested integration of learning episodes provided through…