This paper is a draft for the American Psychological Association Symposium on the conditioning of verbal behavior and attitudes. The author presents the results of several studies he conducted in the classical conditioning of meaning and attitude. These studies attempt to control the measurement effects created by extraneous variables operating on…

Stressful life events can have profound effects on our cognitive and motor abilities, from those that could be construed as adaptive to those not so. In this review, I discuss the general notion that acute stressful experience necessarily impairs our abilities to learn and remember. The effects of stress on operant conditioning, that is, learned…

Motor learning in the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and eyeblink conditioning use similar neural circuitry, and they may use similar cellular plasticity mechanisms. Classically conditioned eyeblink responses undergo extinction after prolonged exposure to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus. We investigated the…

Suggests that if psychologists of learning are to be of assistance to the teachers in open learning classrooms, they will have to reconsider the effect of assuming associative connections as a valid unit for the foundation underlying human learning. (Author/AM)

This article discusses basic learning processes utilized by children with profound intellectual disabilities, including classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and habituation. The article also explores how these learning processes may be used in assessing the capabilities and preferences of children with profound intellectual disabilities.…

Aversive conditioning is an ideal model for studying cholinergic effects on the processes of learning and memory for several reasons. First, deficits produced by selective lesions of the anatomical structures shown to be critical for Pavlovian fear conditioning and inhibitory avoidance (such as the amygdala and hippocampus) resemble those deficits…

Like many forms of Pavlovian conditioning, eyelid conditioning displays robust extinction. We used a computer simulation of the cerebellum as a tool to consider the widely accepted view that extinction involves new, inhibitory learning rather than unlearning of acquisition. Previously, this simulation suggested basic mechanistic features of…

Article attempts to orient the reader to the behavioral approach and an overall perspective of the main elements that must be evaluated in preparation for formulation of a treatment program. (Author/RK)

Describes the biological basis of learning and individuality. Presents an overview of recent discoveries that suggest learning engages a simple set of rules that modify the strength of connection between neurons in the brain. The changes are cited as playing an important role in making each individual unique. (MCO)

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated extinction and renewal of Pavlovian modulation in human sequential Feature Positive (FP) discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, in context a participants were first trained on two FP discriminations, X[right arrow]A+/A- and Y[right arrow]B+/B-. Extinction treatment was administered in the…

This book presents a collection of essays intended for an integrated study of language by anthropologists, literary critics, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and linguists. There is first a discussion of theories concerning the interrelationship of language, thought, and culture. This is followed by a discussion of the development of…

How the nervous system encodes learning and memory processes has interested researchers for 100 years. Over this span of time, a number of basic neuroscience methods has been developed to explore the relationship between learning and the brain, including brain lesion, stimulation, pharmacology, anatomy, imaging, and recording techniques. In this…