We investigated the neuronal activation associated with reexposure to a discrete cocaine-associated stimulus using in situ hybridization to quantify the expression of the plasticity-regulated gene, gamma protein kinase C (gamma PKC), in the limbic-cortical-ventral striatal system. Groups of rats were trained to self-administer cocaine paired with a light stimulus (Paired) or paired with an audi...

The expression of the c-fos proto-oncogene was studied in two different areas of the motor cortex and in the hippocampus of the rat after performance in an escape task in a Skinner box. Performance in this task caused an increase in the number of cells showing fos-like immunoreactivity in layers V and VI of the forelimb motor-sensory cortex with respect to yoked animals which had received the s...

BACKGROUND Attentional biases, namely difficulties both to disengage attention from negative information and to maintain it on positive information, play an important role in the onset and maintenance of the disorder. Recently, researchers have developed specific attentional bias modification (ABM) techniques aimed to modify these maladaptive attentional patterns. However, the application of cu...

Saccadic endpoint variability is often viewed as the outcome of neural noise occurring during sensorimotor processing. However, part of this variability might result from operant learning. We tested this hypothesis by reinforcing dispersions of saccadic amplitude distributions, while maintaining constant their medians. In a first experiment we reinforced the least frequent saccadic amplitudes t...

Rats with skeletal muscles paralyzed by curare to rule out the effect of muscular activity were given artificial respiration and were rewarded by escape and/or avoidance of mild electric shock for either increasing or decreasing their systolic blood pressure. A chronic catheter was implanted within the abdominal aorta for measurement of same. Each trial was signaled by the onset of a light and ...

Older adults typically exhibit poorer face recognition compared to younger adults. These recognition differences may be due to underlying age-related changes in eye movement scanning. We examined whether older adults' recognition could be improved by yoking their eye movements to those of younger adults. Participants studied younger and older faces, under free viewing conditions (bases), throug...