Painful events establish opponent memories: cues that precede pain are remembered negatively, whereas cues that follow pain, thus coinciding with relief are recalled positively. How do individual reinforcement-signaling neurons contribute to this "timing-dependent valence-reversal?" We addressed this question using an optogenetic…

Avoiding unfavorable situations is a vital skill and a constant task for any animal. Situations can be unfavorable because they feature something that the animal wants to escape from, or because they do not feature something that it seeks to obtain. We investigate whether the microbehavioral mechanisms by which these two classes of aversion come…

Dendritic regulatory BC1 RNA is a non-protein-coding (npc) RNA that operates in the translational control of gene expression. The absence of BC1 RNA in BC1 knockout (KO) animals causes translational dysregulation that entails neuronal phenotypic alterations including prolonged epileptiform discharges, audiogenic seizure activity in vivo, and…

Early odor preference learning occurs in one-week-old rodents when a novel odor is paired with a tactile stimulation mimicking maternal care. ß-Adrenoceptors and L-type calcium channels (LTCCs) in the anterior piriform cortex (aPC) are critically involved in this learning. However, whether ß-adrenoceptors interact directly with LTCCs in aPC…

The current study explored the effect of sexual content in advertisements and the programme-advertisement congruence on the memory of sexual and nonsexual advertisements. Seventy participants (41 females and 29 males) were randomly allocated to one of four conditions. They viewed either "The Bachelorette" (sexual programme) or "I'm…

Systems consolidation (SC) theory proposes that recent, contextually rich memories are stored in the hippocampus (HPC). As these memories become remote, they are believed to rely more heavily on cortical structures within the prefrontal cortex (PFC), where they lose much of their contextual detail and become schematized. Odor is a particularly…

Formal science education is the last stage of acquiring scientific knowledge for most people. They rely on the knowledge acquired at school for the rest of their lives. Therefore, it is important that formal education changes students' colloquial knowledge into scientific knowledge and is correct. The study decided to test three situations. In the…

Explicit vocabulary learning is a burden for most of the students. But vocabulary is the basis of each language, and not all words can be acquired incidentally through context or reading. Especially for content and language integrated learning in L2 it is important to offer lots of support for learning a large number of terms in order to avoid…

Scent matters in the lives of humans (and other living creatures). However, thus far, it is largely unexplored in ethnographic work in education. Drawing on and adding to the literature on 'smellscapes' as a way of conceptualising space, this paper adds new insights into early childhood education and care (ECEC) by reporting on the differentials…

Educational entertainment or edutainment is a popular approach to allow learners experience a fun learning environment while acquiring knowledge. Currently, this approach is widely used and has promising benefits, whereby not only it provides a fun learning environment but also cause learners to hardly notice the learning process. However, as…

Studies have shown that neonate rodents exhibit high ability to learn a preference for novel odors associated with thermo-tactile stimuli that mimics maternal care. Artificial odors paired with vigorous strokes in rat pups younger than 10 postnatal days (P), but not older, rapidly induce an orientation-approximation behavior toward the conditioned…

We have shown previously that male rats develop a conditioned ejaculatory preference (CEP) for females scented with a neutral odor like almond or lemon that is paired with the male's post-ejaculatory reward state during their first and subsequent early sexual experiences. However, preexposing males to the neutral odor alone prior to its pairing…

An integration of horticultural therapy and aromatherapy can be beneficial to physical and psychological well-being of undergraduates. Through learning the basics of herbal plants and ways to plant and smell them, and through massaging, smelling, and taking bath with natural herbal essential oils, undergraduates can enjoy the pleasant feeling…

Starvation causes a motivational state that facilitates diverse behaviors such as feeding, walking, and search. Starved "Drosophila" can form odor/feeding-time associations but the role of starvation in encoding of "time" is poorly understood. Here we show that the extent of starvation is correlated with the fly's ability to…

Understanding the nature of olfactory abnormalities is crucial for optimal interventions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, previous studies that have investigated odor identification in children with ASD have produced inconsistent results. The ability to correctly identify an odor relies heavily on visual inputs in the…