The role of observing responses in discrimination learning. Part I.

Level of anxiety and condition of reinforcement or response cost separately affect the rate of discrimination learning. This study examined the extent to which discrimination learning by people reporting high anxiety or low anxiety was affected by reinforcement or response cost. 40 adults volunteered and were assigned to either the feedback-only, reinforcement-only, response cost-only, or reinforcement-response cost condition. Analysis indicated that people reporting low anxiety and receiving reinforcement for correct responses and response cost for incorrect responses learned the discrimination faster than people in the other groups. A weaker demonstration of the facilitative effect of reinforcement and response cost was noted in the people reporting high anxiety.

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Hippocampal-prefrontal theta coupling develops as mice become proficient in associative odorant discrimination learning

10.1101/2021.09.28.462143 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Ramirez-Gordillo ◽

Andrew A. Parra ◽

K. Ulrich Bayer ◽

Diego Restrepo

Keyword(s):

Learning And Memory ◽

Discrimination Learning ◽

Gamma Oscillations ◽

Oscillatory Activity ◽

Dependent Protein Kinase ◽

Dependent Protein ◽

Theta Phase ◽

Phase Amplitude ◽

The Brain

Learning and memory requires coordinated activity between different regions of the brain. Here we studied the interaction between medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampal dorsal CA1 during associative odorant discrimination learning in the mouse. We found that as the animal learns to discriminate odorants in a go-no go task the coupling of high frequency neural oscillations to the phase of theta oscillations (phase-amplitude coupling or PAC) changes in a manner that results in divergence between rewarded and unrewarded odorant-elicited changes in the theta-phase referenced power (tPRP) for beta and gamma oscillations. In addition, in the proficient animal there was a decrease in the coordinated oscillatory activity between CA1 and mPFC in the presence of the unrewarded odorant. Furthermore, the changes in PAC resulted in a marked increase in the accuracy for decoding odorant identity from tPRP when the animal became proficient. Finally, we studied the role of Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II α (CaMKIIα), a protein involved in learning and memory, in oscillatory neural processing in this task. We find that the accuracy for decoding the odorant identity from tPRP decreases in CaMKIIα knockout mice and that this accuracy correlates with behavioral performance. These results implicate a role for PAC and CaMKIIα in olfactory go-no go associative learning in the hippocampal-prefrontal circuit.

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A therapy programme for pre-school language impaired children

South African Journal of Communication Disorders ◽

10.4102/sajcd.v23i1.383 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Linda Narun

Keyword(s):

Language Learning ◽

Discrimination Learning ◽

Syntactic Analysis ◽

Developmental Sequence ◽

Language Impaired ◽

Auxiliary Verbs ◽

Impaired Children ◽

Therapy Programme

This study aimed to establish effective language programmes for pre-school language impaired children based on psycholinguistic principles. Eight language-impaired children 6 males and 2 females between the ages of 3 and 6 years, were the subjects. Language samples were transcribed and subjected to syntactic analysis; semantic aspects were also considered and programmes developed for each subject, based on the information obtained from the language analyses. A developmental sequence was adopted as the basis for therapy A 'slot-method' was used in which language was taught as rule-operated behaviour Principles of discrimination learning were adopted for teaching some aspects of grammar. Auxiliary verbs are reported in detail as this was the most universal error and difficult to teach. The role of imitation in language learning and therapy is discussed.

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