Through four previous editions, students and instructors have relied on this book's clear, concise, and highly accessible overview of the processes and mechanisms responsible for conditioning and learning. Domjan and Delamater summarize major theories of how humans and nonhuman animals learn, along with the classic experiments that support these…

Pavlovian conditioned approach behavior can be directed as much toward discrete cues as it is toward the environmental contexts in which those cues are encountered. The current experiments characterized a tendency of rats to approach object cues whose prior exposure had been paired with reward (conditioned object preference, COP). To demonstrate…

Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to adapt to situations in which rewards and goals change. Potentially addictive drugs may impair flexible decision-making by altering brain mechanisms that compute reward expectancies, thereby facilitating maladaptive drug use. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested the effects of oxycodone exposure on…

Three experiments with rat subjects examined resurgence of an extinguished instrumental response using the procedure introduced by Epstein (1983) with pigeons. There were three phases: (1) initial acquisition of pressing on a lever (L1) for pellet reward, (2) extinction of L1, and (3) a test session in which a second lever (L2) was inserted,…

Considering the evidence that the lateral septal area (LSA) modulates defensive responses, the aim of the present study is to verify if this structure is also involved in contextual fear conditioning responses. Neurotransmission in the LSA was reversibly inhibited by bilateral microinjections of cobalt chloride (CoCl[subscript 2], 1 mM) 10 min…

Four bonobos, seven gorillas, and six orangutans were presented with two small rectangular boards on a platform. One of the boards had a piece of food under it so that it acquired an inclined orientation whereas the other remained flat on the platform. Subjects preferentially selected the inclined board. In another experiment, subjects were…

The game of Matching Pennies (MP), a simplified version of the more popular Rock, Papers, Scissors, schematically represents competitions between organisms with incentives to predict each other's behavior. Optimal performance in iterated MP competitions involves the production of random choice patterns and the detection of nonrandomness in the…

It is known from studies outside the brain that upon binding to its receptor, angiotensin-(1-7) elicits the release of prostanoids and nitric oxide (NO). Cyclooxygenase (COX) is a key enzyme that converts arachidonic acid to prostaglandins. Since there are no data available so far on the role of COX-2 in the amygdala, in a first step we…

Previous reports have shown that overexpression of the growth- and plasticity-associated protein GAP-43 improves memory. However, the relation between the levels of this protein to memory enhancement remains unknown. Here, we studied this issue in transgenic mice (G-Phos) overexpressing native, chick GAP-43. These G-Phos mice could be divided at…

Information that is spaced over time is better remembered than the same amount of information massed together. This phenomenon, known as the spacing effect, was explored with respect to its effect on learning and neurogenesis in the adult dentate gyrus of the hippocampal formation. Because the cells are generated over time and because learning…

The role of adult brain neurogenesis (generating new neurons) in learning and memory appears to be quite firmly established in spite of some criticism and lack of understanding of what the new neurons serve the brain for. Also, the few experiments showing that blocking adult neurogenesis causes learning deficits used irradiation and various drugs…

In autoshaping experiments, we quantified the acquisition of anticipatory head poking in individual mice, using an algorithm that finds changes in the slope of a cumulative record. In most mice, upward changes in the amount of anticipatory poking per trial were abrupt, and tended to occur at session boundaries, suggesting that the session is as…

How do capuchin monkeys learn to use stones to crack open nuts? Perception-action theory posits that individuals explore producing varying spatial and force relations among objects and surfaces, thereby learning about affordances of such relations and how to produce them. Such learning supports the discovery of tool use. We present longitudinal…

Learning and memory are central topics in behavioral neuroscience, and inbred mice strains are widely investigated. However, operant conditioning techniques are not as extensively used in this field as they should be, given the effectiveness of the methodology of the experimental analysis of behavior. In the present study, male C57Bl/6 mice,…

In this paper, we demonstrate nondeclarative sequence learning in mice using an animal analog of the human serial reaction time task (SRT) that uses a within-group comparison of behavior in response to a repeating sequence versus a random sequence. Ten female B6CBA mice performed eleven 96-trial sessions containing 24 repetitions of a 4-trial…