When studying informal science programs, researchers often overlook the opportunities enabled and constrained in each program and the practices reinforced for participants. In this case study, I examined the normative scientific practices reinforced in one-week-long "Herpetology" (the study of reptiles and amphibians) program for…

In the United States, the phrase "goin' fishin'" is synonymous with taking a break and leaving everyday cares behind to go enjoy the outdoors, spend time with family or friends, and, if one is lucky, catch some tasty fish. According to the American Sportfishing Association, fishing is a hobby pursued by some 40 million Americans,…

Museum games can be a powerful meaning-making experience for players, but only if we understand that what makes games fun is also what makes them meaningful. Renowned game designer Sid Meier ("Civilization", "Railroad Tycoon", "Pirates") famously defined a good game as "a series of interesting choices." What…

Physical pain (induced by tissue damage) and psychological pain (induced by surprising incentive loss) share a set of common neural substrates, but little is known about their interactions. The present research studied such interactions using the formalin test to induce physical pain and consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) to induce…

Pigeons prefer a positive discriminative (S+) stimulus that follows a less preferred event (a large number of required responses, a longer delay, or the absence of food) over a different S+ with a similar history of reinforcement that follows a more preferred event (a single required response, no delay, or food). We proposed that this phenomenon…

Insulin has been shown to impact on learning and memory in both humans and animals, but the downstream signaling mechanisms involved are poorly characterized. Insulin receptor substrate-2 (Irs2) is an adaptor protein that couples activation of insulin- and insulin-like growth factor-1 receptors to downstream signaling pathways. Here, we have…

This study implemented an exploratory analysis to examine how a sample of mental health professionals incorporates specific animal-assisted techniques into the therapeutic process. An extensive review of literature related to animal-assisted therapy (AAT) resulted in the identification of 18 techniques and 10 intentions for the practice of AAT in…

Deletion of the GluA1 AMPA receptor subunit selectively impairs short-term memory for spatial locations. We further investigated this deficit by examining memory for discrete nonspatial visual stimuli in an operant chamber. Unconditioned suppression of magazine responding to visual stimuli was measured in wild-type and GluA1 knockout mice.…

Since 1992 C. J. Rogers has lived with wolves and studied their societies at Raised by Wolves, a licensed, nonprofit research sanctuary situated in a high valley of New Mexico's Zuni Mountains, not far from the Four Corners. Rogers, who has taught at Northeastern Illinois University and Western New Mexico University, holds doctorates in both…

The effects of reinforcer magnitude and response requirement on pigeons' say choices in an experimental homologue of human say-do correspondence were assessed in two experiments. The procedure was similar to a conditional discrimination procedure except the pigeons chose both a sample stimulus (the say component) and a comparison stimulus that…

This article describes the findings from the assessment of a touch-screen, multi-media learning program on livestock health and production: "The Daktari." The program was tested on a sample of 62 livestock keepers in the Nairobi slums of Kariobangi and Kibera. The study examined prior knowledge regarding three livestock diseases (liver…

A recent theory of pigeons' equivalence-class formation (Urcuioli, 2008) predicts that reflexivity, an untrained ability to match a stimulus to itself, should be observed after training on two "mirror-image" symbolic successive matching tasks plus identity successive matching using some of the symbolic matching stimuli. One group of pigeons was…

Although newborns have surprised scientists with their learning skills, proficiency on concurrent schedules of reinforcement requires (in effect) the ability to integrate and compare behavior-consequence relations over time. Can very young animals obey the quantitative relation that applies to such repeated choices, the generalized matching law?…

Eight pigeons responded in a three-component concurrent-chains procedure, with either independent or dependent initial links. Relative probability and immediacy of reinforcement in the terminal links were both varied, and outcomes on individual trials (reinforcement or nonreinforcement) were either signaled or unsignaled. Terminal-link fixed-time…

Animal-human interactions have been found to have positive influences on children across the world. In particular, research supports the benefits of animal-assisted activities in addressing students' social and behavioral problems within the classroom environment. The general information about animal-assisted activities provided in this…