Comments on Gauvain's discussion, in this issue, of the development of thinking from a sociocultural perspective, expanding her analysis by comparing research on apes who have developed in natural habitats with apes raised by humans in something resembling a human culture. Argues that the study of nonhuman primates can contribute to the emerging…

Environmental familiarization is a learning phenomenon embedded within most tasks used to study learning and motivation. Given its prevalence there is surprisingly little systematic behavioral research on factors affecting familiarization. The six experiments reported in the present report used rats' tendency to interact more with a novel object…

Fetal and infant rats can learn to avoid odors paired with illness before development of brain areas supporting this learning in adults, suggesting an alternate learning circuit. Here we begin to document the transition from the infant to adult neural circuit underlying odor-malaise avoidance learning using LiCl (0.3 M; 1% of body weight, ip) and…

A battery of behavioral tests yielding 79 measures, many of which were presumably related to learning and memory, was administered to house mice of seven inbred strains. An analysis of the factorial structure indicated that the two principal and most pervasive factors underlying performance on the battery involved the initiation and maintenance of…

These experiments are addressed specifically to the question of whether transituational transfer of immunizing and therapeutic effects will occur when these procedures involve responses and settings which are very different from those used in final testing. (Author/RK)

Examines the relative effectiveness of either partial or total success training as a preventive agent against the debilitating effect of noncontingent reinforcement. (Author/RK)

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,…

Studies of gene expression following fear conditioning have demonstrated that the inducible transcription factor, "egr-1," is increased in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala shortly following fear conditioning. These studies suggest that "egr-1" and its protein product Egr-1 in the amygdala are important for learning and memory of fear. To…

Author critically comments on D.W. Hamlyn's work on human learning which borrows from the classical philosophies of rationalism and empiricism. These lack a proper biological perspective for man and an adequate appreciation of man's social nature. The author discusses animal-like instinctive behavior and specifically social learning. For journal…

A series of 13 experiments employing mice systematically investigated shock-elicited activity in a circular field and escape performance in a shuttle box following exposure to either escapable or inescapable shock. Results show that escape interference induced by inescapable shock may be comfortably interpreted in terms of a decreased tendency for…

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…

Research indicates that the effectiveness of instruction in the elementary classroom is enhanced when it incorporates materials that actively engage students in the generation of scientific explanations. To this end, this document describes an exercise that allows Kindergarten students to explore the basic principles of animal behavior in an…

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…