While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or…

Sensory judgments improve with practice. Such perceptual learning is often thought to reflect an increase in perceptual sensitivity. However, it may also represent a decrease in response bias, with unpracticed observers acting in part on a priori hunches rather than sensory evidence. To examine whether this is the case, 55 observers practiced…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

An alternating treatments design with a control condition was used to evaluate and compare the effects of two taped-problem interventions on addition fact fluency. Both taped-problem interventions were identical with the exception of the time delay between the auditory cue of the problem and the answer. One condition used a 2-s delay and the other…

Two-way active avoidance (2WAA) involves learning Pavlovian (association of a sound cue with a foot shock) and instrumental (shock avoidance) contingencies. To identify regions where dopamine (DA) is involved in mediating 2WAA, we restored DA signaling in specific brain areas of dopamine-deficient (DD) mice by local reactivation of conditionally…

Special edition devoted to media in modern language instruction. (RS)

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…

Visual fixation on one of two blank targets was reinforced with either visual or auditory stimuli in one of 3 intensity sequences: (1) low, medium, high; (2) medium, high, low; and (3) high, low, medium. An analysis of variance of learning scores for the 48 14-week-old infants resulted in a significant interaction of intensity and order and in a…

In experiment one, subjects learned a word list in blocked or random forms of auditory/visual change. In experiment two, high- and low-conceptual rigid subjects read passages in shift conditions or nonshift, exclusively in auditory or visual modes. A shift in modality provided a powerful release from proactive interference. (Author/CM)

Of particular interest to those exploring students' learning modalities is the relationship between the visual and auditory systems and reading recall. Among the findings of studies that have investigated this relationship are the following: (1) reading competency is dependent as much on auditory processing as on visual processing; (2) when visual…

Heart rate change was used as the index of the orienting response (OR) of 102 kindergarten children. Heart rate change was measured by recording heart rate upon the presentation of tones. 15 similar tones followed by a different, 16th tone, were used. From this data the children were divided into high, medium, or low orientors. Following the…

Heart rate change was used as the index of the orienting response (OR) of 102 kindergarten children. Heart rate change was measured by recording heart rate upon the presentation of tones. 15 similar tones followed by a different, 16th tone, were used. From this data the children were divided into high, medium, or low orientors. Following the…

The retention of the conditioned response was tested in a retroactive interference paradigm. Results suggested that what is learned by children in simple conditioning paradigms is different than what is learned by adults in the same paradigms. (Author/PN)