The present research explored the effects of restraint stress on two situations involving incentive downshift: consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) and extinction of escape behavior in the Barnes maze. First, Experiment 1 confirmed that the restraint stress procedure used in these experiments increased levels of circulating…

In evaluative conditioning (EC), the pairing of a positively or negatively valenced stimulus (US) with another neutral stimulus (CS) leads to a corresponding change in liking of the CS. EC research so far has concentrated on using unambiguously positive or negative USs. However, attitude objects often possess multiple features that can be positive…

Evidence concerning the possibility of mental time travel into the future by animals was reviewed. Both experimental laboratory studies and field observations were considered. Paradigms for the study of future anticipation and planning included inhibition of consumption of current food contingent on future receipt of either a larger quantity or…

Generalization gradients have been investigated widely in animal conditioning experiments, but much less so in human predictive learning tasks. Here, we apply the experimental design of a recent study on conditioned fear generalization in humans (Lissek et al., 2008) to a predictive learning task, and examine the effects of a number of relevant…

Impulsive behavior has been investigated through choice between a smaller/immediate reinforcer and a larger/delayed reinforcer, or through performance on a differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) schedule. In the present study, we investigated a methodological divergence between these two procedures: in the former procedure, delay is a…

Pairs of rats foraged in trials either together or separately in an open field apparatus for pellets hidden in discreet locations in a 5 x 5 matrix. Trial duration was either 1 or 4 min. The tendency to choose locations that had earlier been visited by another rat was examined by comparing the choices made in the presence and absence of the other…

A theory devised initially on the basis of instrumental reward schedule data, such as the PREE, was extended to deal with various Pavlovian findings. These Pavlovian findings include blocking, unblocking, relative validity, positive and negative patterning, renewal, reinstatement, reacquisition, and inhibition. In addition, the sequential model…

The present experiment compared the effects of a food-based conditioned inhibitor on food seeking vs. cocaine seeking behavior. In two groups of rats, the A+/AB- Pavlovian conditioned inhibition procedure was used to create a conditioned inhibitor for food. Then, for one group of rats (Food-Food Group), a click stimulus was established as an…

Five experiments were designed to study spontaneous recovery (SR) in two situations involving consummatory behavior: consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) and consummatory extinction (cE). SR of consummatory suppression should occur if incentive downshift induces an egocentric memory encoding information about the emotional reaction to…

Two conditioned taste aversion experiments with rats were conducted to establish if a target taste that had received a prior pairing with illness could be subject to second-order conditioning during extinction treatment in compound with a flavor that also received prior conditioning. In these experiments, the occurrence of second-order…

Two lick suppression studies were conducted with water-deprived rats to investigate the influence of spatial similarity in cue interaction. Experiment 1 assessed the influence of similarity of the spatial origin of competing cues in a blocking procedure. Greater blocking was observed in the condition in which the auditory blocking cue and the…

The renewal of extinguished conditioned behaviour appears to reflect context-dependent learning. The present research used a conditioned suppression task with humans to examine whether instructions concerning the context could influence renewal. Pairings of a conditional stimulus (CS) and unconditional stimulus (US) were made in one context,…

Three experiments examined the effects of physical context changes and multiple extinction contexts on the renewal of conditioned suppression in humans. A conditioned suppression task used an undesirable event as the unconditional stimulus (US). One conditional stimulus (CS+) predicted the occurrence of the US and another (CS-) predicted US…

Rats cached pieces of cheese on four different arms of an eight-arm radial maze. On a retrieval test given 45min later, rats learned to return to arms where food was cached before arms where food had not been cached. Tests were then performed in which cache sites on one side of the maze were always modified (pilfered or degraded), but cache sites…