We investigated the role of cholinergic neurotransmission in olfactory fear learning. Mice receiving pairings of odor and foot shock displayed fear to the trained odor the following day. Pretraining injections of the nicotinic antagonist mecamylamine had no effect on subsequent freezing, while the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine significantly…

Inductive generalization, where people go beyond the data provided, is a basic cognitive capability, and it underpins theoretical accounts of learning, categorization, and decision making. To complete the inductive leap needed for generalization, people must make a key "sampling" assumption about how the available data were generated.…

Following training on an easy size discrimination, pigeons were matched on the basis of stimulus control by the positive stimulus following generalization tests. Three subjects were immediately retrained on a more difficult discrimination along the same dimension, while the remaining three subjects were retrained after a six-month delay. The…

The problem investigated was the relationship between cognitive category width and certain other cognitive and perceptual variables, with the intent of gaining additional insight into the effect which individual differences in cognitive conceptualization exert on certain other behaviors. Cognitive category width, defined as the score obtained on…

This study attempts to determine if the stimulus generalization concept is applicable to school-relevant instruction when the material to be learned is verbal science information. The delivery techniques under investigation were audio, printed, and a simultaneous combination of both media. Three hundred and thirteen tenth grade biology students…

Purpose of the present research was to determine whether certain Pavlovian conditioning phenomena occur in a simple probability learning situation. (Authors)

Eight experiments are reported: the first four demonstrate the context effects in short-term-memory (that retrieval from STM improves as the context for learning is made more similar to the context for retrieval), and four more experiments examine the mechanism by which the context effect might operate. (Author/MB)

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

The combined theories of cue summation and stimulus generalization provide the theoretical model for this study. First, the study attempted to determine if supplementing a theoretical presentation of rhetorical principles with printed, audio, and audiovisual speech models would contribute to a significant increase in learning as evidence by…

Studies the ability of college women to generalize resistance to stress when learning lists of nonsense syllables. Subjects trained under one type of stress learned more easily under a second type of stress than did subjects trained under nonstressful conditions. Table, graph, and bibliography. (RW)

A model of informational interaction between teachers and learners has been developed and the first facet for its taxonomy derived. The model focuses on the internal cognitive events of teaching and learning in human beings generally, rather than on the specific roles of instructor and student. Teacher-learner communication is described in terms…

Two studies examined the impact of temporal synchrony on infants' learning of and memory for sight-sound pairs. Findings indicated that 7-month-olds had no difficulty learning auditory-visual pairs regardless of temporal synchrony, remembering them 10 minutes later and 1 week later. Three-month-olds showed poorer learning in no-synchrony than in…

One hundred twenty-eight preschool boys were subjects in a 4x2x2 factorial design to investigate the change in reinforcer efficacy as a function of prior stimulus exposure. The factors were: (1) amount of repetition, 5, 25, 45, or 65; (2) reinforcer, good or bell; and (3) satiator, good or bell. Two additional groups were run as control groups to…

Describes recent research findings in the area of neurobiology and its relationship to learning and memory. The article provides definitions of associative and nonassociative learning, identifies essential memory trace circuits of the mammalian brain, and discusses some neural mechanisms of learning. (TW)