Stable long term avoidance responding and fixed ratio avoidance training

Active Avoidance: Neural Mechanisms and Attenuation of Pavlovian Conditioned Responding.

Patients with anxiety disorders often experience a relapse in symptoms after exposure therapy. Similarly, threat responses acquired during Pavlovian threat conditioning often return after extinction learning. Accordingly, there is a need for alternative methods to persistently reduce threat responding. Studies in rodents have suggested that exercising behavioral control over an aversive stimulu...

Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding.

Exposure of dogs to inescapable shocks under a variety of conditions reliably interfered with subsequent instrumental escape-avoidance responding in a new situation. Use of a higher level of shock during instrumental avoidance training did not attenuate interference; this was taken as evidence against an explanation based upon adaptation to shock. Ss curarized during their exposure to inescapab...

Post-training disruption of Arc protein expression in the anterior cingulate cortex impairs long-term memory for inhibitory avoidance training.

The activity-regulated-cytoskeletal-associated protein (Arc) has a well established role in memory consolidation and synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and amygdala. However the role of Arc within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain involved in processing memory for pain, has yet to be examined. Here we sought to determine if Arc protein within neurons of the rat ACC i...

Extinction of responding maintained by timeout from avoidance.

The resistance to extinction of lever pressing maintained by timeout from avoidance was examined. Rats were trained under a concurrent schedule in which responses on one lever postponed shock on a free-operant avoidance (Sidman) schedule (response-shock interval = 30 s) and responses on another lever produced 2 min of signaled timeout from avoidance on a variable-ratio 15 schedule. Following ex...

Short-term and Long-term Consequences of Predator Avoidance by Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor)