The use of mixed reality in science education has been increasing and as such it has become more important to understand how information is learned in these virtual environments. Spatial ability is important in many learning contexts, but especially in neuroanatomy education where learning the locations and spatial relationships between brain…

The aim of the present study was to analyze the surface expression of the NMDA-like receptors during the consolidation of contextual learning in the crab "Neohelice granulata". Memory storage is based on alterations in the strength of synaptic connections between neurons. The glutamatergic synapses undergo various forms of…

Several forms of long-term depression (LTD) of glutamatergic synaptic transmission have been identified in the dorsal striatum and in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Such experience-dependent synaptic plasticity might play important roles in reward-related learning. The GABA[subscript A] receptor agonist muscimol was recently found to trigger a…

Long-term fear memory formation in the hippocampus and neocortex depends upon brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signaling after acquisition. Incremental, appetitive odor discrimination learning is thought to depend substantially on the differentiation of adult-born neurons within the olfactory bulb (OB)--a process that is closely associated…

Eyeblink conditioning given in the explicit presence of hippocampal ? results in accelerated learning and enhanced multiple-unit responses, with slower learning and suppression of unit activity under non-? conditions. Recordings from putative pyramidal cells during ?-contingent training show that pretrial ?-state is linked to the probability of…

Single prolonged stress (SPS) has been used to examine mechanisms via which stress exposure leads to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. SPS induces fear extinction retention deficits, but neural circuits critical for mediating these deficits are unknown. To address this gap, we examined the effect of SPS on neural activity in brain regions…

Fear inhibition is markedly impaired in adolescent rodents and humans. The present experiments investigated whether this impairment is critically determined by the animal's age at the time of fear learning or their age at fear extinction. Male rats (n = 170) were tested for extinction retention after conditioning and extinction at different ages.…

Learning-induced modulation of neuronal intrinsic excitability is a metaplasticity mechanism that can impact the acquisition of new memories. Although the amygdala is important for emotional learning and other behaviors, including fear and anxiety, whether learning alters intrinsic excitability within the amygdala has received very little…

Learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli is essential to achieving efficient and fluid attention, and serves as the complement to increasing attention to relevant stimuli. The different cholinergic (ACh) subsystems within the basal forebrain regulate attention in distinct but complementary ways. ACh projections from the substantia innominata/nucleus…

Human participants and recurrent ("connectionist") neural networks were both trained on a categorization system abstractly similar to natural language systems involving irregular ("strong") classes and a default class. Both the humans and the networks exhibited staged learning and a generalization pattern reminiscent of the…

In this article, we present a perspective on the role of the hippocampal system in generalization, instantiated in a computational model called REMERGE (recurrency and episodic memory results in generalization). We expose a fundamental, but neglected, tension between prevailing computational theories that emphasize the function of the hippocampus…

The hippocampus and the striatum are thought to play distinct roles in learning and memory, each supporting an independent memory system. A fundamental question is whether, and how, these systems interact to jointly contribute to learning and memory. In particular, it remains unknown whether the striatum contributes selectively to implicit,…

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) may provide modulatory signals that, respectively, influence hippocampal (HPC)- and striatal-dependent memory. Electrophysiological studies investigating neural correlates of learning and memory of dopamine (DA) neurons during classical conditioning tasks have found DA…

Activation of the infralimbic region (IL) of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) reduces conditioned fear in a variety of situations, and the IL is thought to play an important role in the extinction of conditioned fear. Here we report a series of experiments using contextual fear conditioning in which the IL is activated with the GABAa antagonist…

We examined the organization and function of the ventral object processing pathway. The prevailing theoretical approach in this field holds that the ventral object processing stream has a modular organization, in which visual perception is carried out in posterior regions and visual memory is carried out, independently, in the anterior temporal…