One experiment with rats explored whether an extinction-cue prevents the recovery of extinguished lever-pressing responses. Initially, rats were trained to perform one instrumental response (R1) for food in Context A, and a different instrumental response (R2) in Context B. Then, responses were extinguished each in the alternate context (R1 in…

Meaningful and enjoyable experiences are important in the education of children. In this qualitative case study, the garden program (incl. market garden shop, garden care, Kid's Kitchen, and chicken coop) in one Australian primary school was explored to determine its impact on the mathematical learning of children. Data were collected using focus…

I present my perspective on the design process in this article, arguing for a focus on student learning and "slow design" that stems from knowledge of mathematics and their support system in the learning process. I have a question about the design process academization and task design research direction. Numerous examples from my work at…

In Ethiopia, there has been increasing recognition of the differing educational needs and experiences of pastoralists as compared to 'settled' agricultural communities. Although the starting point has usually been how to integrate such marginalised groups into mainstream schooling, research has revealed important insights into learning outside…

Habituation is a highly conserved phenomenon that remains poorly understood at the molecular level. Invertebrate model systems, like "Caenorhabditis elegans," can be a powerful tool for investigating this fundamental process. Here we established a high-throughput learning assay that used real-time computer vision software for behavioral…

Despite the intimate relationship dogs share with humans in Western society, we know relatively little about the variables that produce and maintain dog social behavior towards humans. One possibility is that human social interaction is itself a reinforcer for dog behavior. As an initial assessment of the variables that might maintain dog social…

Cultural transmission is often viewed as a domain-general process. However, a growing literature suggests that learnability is influenced by content and context. The idea of a learnability landscape is introduced as a way of representing the effects of interacting factors on how easily information is acquired. Extending prior work (Barrett &…

Previous work has shown that children are able to make a spatial inference about adjacent locations that have only been experienced indirectly (Hazen, Lockman, & Pick, 1978). We sought to replicate this finding in rats, on a conceptually analogous task. In a first experiment, rats (n = 8) were given 110 training trials on a task in which they…

Rats were able to search multiple food cups in a foraging task and successfully return to a fixed, but not a variable, start location. Reducing the number of food cups to be searched resulted in an improvement in performance in the variable start condition. Performance was better when only one or two food cups had to be visited but was still…

To test the hypothesis that pigeons will only code the more salient sample when samples differ markedly in salience, pigeons were trained with samples consisting of a 2-s presentation of food (highly salient sample) and an 8-s presentation of keylight (less salient sample). During retention testing, pigeons tended to respond at longer delays as if…

Appetitive contextual excitation supported by intertrial unconditioned stimuli was more easily overcome by timed conditioned responding in rats using quiet (Experiment 1) rather than noisy (Experiment 2) food pellet deliveries. Head-entry responding in acquisition peaked above the contextual baseline when pellet delivery occurred 10, 30, 60, or 90…

Five experiments with rat subjects compared the effects of immediate and delayed extinction on the durability of extinction learning. Three experiments examined extinction of fear conditioning (using the conditioned emotional response method), and two experiments examined extinction of appetitive conditioning (using the food-cup entry method). In…

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…

Rats cached pieces of cheese on four different arms of an eight-arm radial maze. On a retrieval test given 45min later, rats learned to return to arms where food was cached before arms where food had not been cached. Tests were then performed in which cache sites on one side of the maze were always modified (pilfered or degraded), but cache sites…

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,…