Learning & Behavior最新文献

Dreyer et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, e2414274121, (2025) challenged ant and human groups to carry an oddly shaped load through a series of narrow rooms, and found that both succeed remarkably well, but used very different tactics. While the fact that humans dumb themselves down in some groups is interesting, the discovery of a collective memory built into the interaction patterns of the ants is extremely exciting.

An experiment using a predictive learning task with college students evaluated the impact of a stimulus associated with extinction on an AAB renewal design. Four groups of participants learned a specific relationship between two cues (X and Y) and two outcomes (O1 and O2) in Context A during the first phase. Subsequently, both cues were subjected to extinction in the same Context A. During the Test, extinction was in effect for both cues; one group experienced it in Context A (AAA), while the other three groups were tested in a second Context B. We observed a reduction in the AAB renewal effect when participants received a stimulus associated with extinction (AAB*), but not when testing involved presenting a new stimulus (AAB). However, the reductive effect of the extinction reminder was not observed when the stimulus was presented only during the 75% of the extinction trials (AAB*75). These findings suggest that, under certain circumstances, the level of association of the extinction reminder with extinction might affect its efficacy in reducing response recovery.

Cue-exposure is a treatment (e.g. for addictions and phobias) that aims to extinguish conditioned responses to target cues. However, especially in the case of addiction, relapse still occurs after cue-exposure and this may be due to recovery of conditioned responses outside of the extinction context. Super-extinction and deepened-extinction are two compound-cue extinction procedures which have been assessed for their capacity to produce more robust extinction than standard single-cue extinction procedures. We carried out further assessment of super and deepened-extinction protocols but found no evidence that they produced less response recovery compared to single-cue extinction. Contrariwise, super-extinction actually produced more recovery than the other two conditions. These results can be understood in terms of configural associative models (configural Rescorla-Wagner and Pearce configural model) but not in terms of the simple elemental Rescorla-Wagner model. Furthermore, the configural models provided better fits to overall data, and the Pearce configural model was better than the configural Rescorla-Wagner model.

In a clever adaptation of the two-cups task, a recent paper tested for reasoning by exclusion in bees. Although further work is necessary to rule out competing hypotheses, this study advances our ability to test cognitive capacities in invertebrates.

Perinatal undernutrition sensitizes offspring to the development of chronic adult metabolic diseases, including cognitive dysfunction, which poses significant public health issues. Undernutrition is the most powerful condition of physiological stress, and epidemiological studies indicate detrimental effects on cognitive function and behavior in human offspring exposed to inadequate perinatal nutrition, leading to increased peroxidation of PUFAs in the brain. To address these issues, the present study investigated the protective effects of the antioxidant nutraceuticals astaxanthin (AsX) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) on the protective effect of DHA in the presence of antioxidants on the cognitive dysfunction and oxidative stress induced by perinatal undernutrition. Using a Wistar rat model, AsX and DHA improved learning and memory skills in perinatally undernourished offspring. The cognitive parameters included the RAM and NOR tests, and the oxidative stress parameters were assessed by the estimation of GSH, MDA, total nitrite, and TAC. This study revealed spatial learning, memory dysfunction, and abnormal exploratory behavior in offspring exposed to perinatal undernutrition at different time points in postnatal life, and these effects were ameliorated by AsX and DHA. Similarly, oxidative stress induced by perinatal undernutrition was also ameliorated by AsX and DHA. Induced oxidative stress was significantly correlated with cognitive function. This study revealed the potential of AsX and DHA supplementation during the perinatal period for the future development of cognitive dysfunction.

In Pavlovian sensitization, conditioned stimuli are said to activate response modes (e.g., feeding, sexual, or fear), which result in an increase in the response to other stimuli that activate the same response mode. Pavlovian sensitization effects are likely to result from any encounter with a highly arousing stimulus, leading to high translational relevance for investigations of anxiety disorders, cognition, and the neurobiology of learning.

A recent study demonstrated that marmoset "phee calls" include information specific to the intended receiver of the call, and that receivers respond more to calls that are specifically directed at them. The authors interpret this as showing that these calls are name-like vocal labels for individual marmosets, but there is at least one other possibility that would equally explain these data.

In two online experiments, we aimed to study the relationship between emotion dysregulation and persistence of incentive salience attributed to reward cues. Participants' negative urgency (NU) was assessed before they completed a value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) task measuring incentive salience as attentional sign-tracking. This consisted of two phases - rewarded and unrewarded - to evaluate the persistence of the VMAC effect. Subsequently, a Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) procedure was employed as another measure of incentive salience. In Experiment 1 both outcome-specific and general PIT effects were assessed, along with the impact of instrumental outcome devaluation (OD). Experiment 2 focused on the effect of Pavlovian extinction on specific PIT. Both outcome devaluation and extinction are indices of implicit emotion regulation. In Experiment 1, the OD index showed a significant positive correlation with specific PIT and a negative correlation with the NU score. In Experiment 2, the extinction index of specific PIT, linked to the level of explicit knowledge of the contingencies, correlated negatively with NU. The VMAC effect and its persistence showed correlations with NU, positive and negative, respectively (Experiment 1). No relationships were found between any measure of VMAC and OD or PIT effects in any of the experiments. These findings suggest that difficulties in emotion regulation are associated with increased attentional sign-tracking and can hinder action control and selection. These phenomena may be governed by distinct mechanisms, with the VMAC effect being more automatic and the specific PIT effect exhibiting varying degrees of goal-directed behavior depending on the effectiveness of implicit emotion regulation strategies.

Eavesdropping on heterospecific alarm calls can provide valuable information about predator presence and therefore yield survival benefits. However, if, how, and why individuals react to heterospecific alarms is poorly known. If heterospecific alarms trigger a response, individuals might either stop their own vocal activity (acoustic suppression), to avoid being detected, or start alarming (acoustic stimulation), to warn conspecifics or deter predators. Here, we performed playback experiments with the alarms of 14 common forest passerine species and tested whether heterospecifics changed their acoustic behavior after playbacks and whether this involved suppression or stimulation. Moreover, we tested whether bird behavior was influenced by species-specific attributes such as escape capability, the propensity of being predated by raptors and carnivorous mammals, and the acoustic properties of alarms affecting detectability. Birds uttered alarms more frequently after playbacks than after silent controls, gave the same alarms as they normally use in response to conspecifics, and did not suppress their acoustic activity after playbacks. These results indicate that birds perceive threat from heterospecific alarms and are contagiously stimulated to alarm, rather than inhibited. Species with morphological attributes that promote agility and suffering low predation rates were more acoustically stimulated by heterospecific alarms, irrespective of the acoustic properties of the playback or their own alarms, indicating that the propensity to join into an alarm calling bout is mediated by predation risk. This study provides evidence for contagious alarming across species, for potential costs of responding to these stimuli, and shows a facilitative role of signalers within communities.

In this commentary, we respond to Jaakkola, (2025), who raised several concerns regarding our findings on vocal labeling in marmosets (Oren et al. Science, 385, 996-1003, 2024). We address each point in turn, clarifying that marmosets use socially learned, arbitrary vocal labels for specific conspecifics - labels that are neither imitations nor acoustically derived from the receiver's own calls. We show that classifier models trained on individual callers reliably identify the intended receiver, while cross-caller models reveal family-specific label conventions. We also provide evidence that vocal accommodation does not account for the observed behavior, and we argue that the consistent, receiver-specific use of labels reflects a stable mapping between individuals and calls - indicative of an internal representation of identity. Taken together, our findings support cognitively controlled social calling in marmosets and suggest a primate precursor to name-like referential communication.