Describes installation of a hybrid chilled water/ice thermal storage plant for the Lucile Erwin Middle School in Loveland, Colorado, which has saved more than $18,000 in energy costs annually. (EV)

Describes how the Brevard County School District in Florida teamed with companies EPRI and Florida Power and Light to implement a dual-path, low temperature air-distribution system used in conjunction with thermal energy storage. (EV)

Five male preschool children were studied to determine the extent to which the generalized motor imitation model applies to vocal imitation. The use of a reinforced-imitation condition produced a systematic increase in verbal matching responses among three of the five children, which is consistent with previous studies. (SW)

Surprising downshifts from more preferred (training incentive) to less preferred incentives (test incentive) are usually accompanied by emotional activation and suppression of conditioned behavior in rats. Two experiments were designed to determine whether consummatory behavior is similarly affected by downshifts of equal proportions. Within…

The authors comment on B. Gawronski and G. V. Bodenhausen's (2006; see record 2006-10465-003) associative-propositional evaluation model of implicit and explicit attitudes by examining the claims that (a) truth value is attached to propositions but not to associations; (b) pattern activation is qualitatively different from syllogistic structure of…

In Experiment 1, 12 senior citizens from the community were trained with 18 sets of conditional discriminations. Training included 2-, 3-, and 4-choice matching-to-sample (MTS) configurations in linear series (LS), many-to-one (MTO), and one-to-many (OTM) training structures. Training structure order was counterbalanced across participants. The…

In two conditioned lick suppression experiments using water-deprived rats, we examined the effects of following Pavlovian conditioned inhibition training (i.e., A-US/AX-NoUS) with pairings of the training excitor (A) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the effects of this posttraining inflation treatment on Pavlovian…

In four experiments using albino rats in an ABA fear renewal paradigm, we studied conditioned fear in the A test context following extinction in Context B. Conditioned suppression of operant responding was the index of fear. In Experiments 1-3, we found that extinguishing a feared cue in compound with a putative conditioned inhibitor of fear led…

Three mechanisms can explain second-order conditioning: (1) The second-order conditioned stimulus (CS2) could activate a representation of the first-order conditioned stimulus (CS1), thereby provoking the conditioned response (CR); The CS2 could enter into an excitatory association with either (2) the representation governing the CR, or (3) with a…

The present study explored whether a similar phenomenon to stimulus over-selectivity occurred in rats, in the hope of establishing a non-human model for the autism. Rats were serially presented with two-15 seconds, two-element compound stimuli prior to the delivery of food, in an appetitive classical conditioning procedure. Each compound stimulus…

A time window is a limited period after an event initially occurs in which additional information can be integrated with the memory of that event. It shuts when the memory is forgotten. The time window hypothesis holds that the impact of a manipulation at different points within the time window is nonuniform. In two operant conditioning…

In this article, the author shares an anecdote demonstrating one-trial learning which is commonplace in human behavior. The demonstration suggests that under some conditions, when people hear someone speak, their behavior changes, even in the absence of an apparent contingency of reinforcement, but only if they have in their repertoire verbal…

We report an experiment investigating the effects of conditioning books as reinforcers for observing responses on the learning of textual responses by pre-school children. The independent variable was the acquisition of conditioned reinforcement of observing responses and choice of book stimuli in free play settings where children could choose to…

Previous work has demonstrated that drugs increasing brain concentrations of acetylcholine can enhance cognition in aging and brain-damaged organisms. The present study assessed whether galantamine (GAL), an allosteric modulator of nicotinic cholinergic receptors and weak acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, could improve acquisition and retention of…

Having recently shown that extinction of conditioned fear depends on L-type voltage-gated calcium channels (LVGCCs), we have been seeking other protocols that require this unusual induction mechanism. We tested latent inhibition (LI) of fear, because LI resembles extinction except that cue exposures precede, rather than follow, cue-shock pairing.…