Rats undergoing extinction of lever-pressing for food after the attenuation of an external feedback for this behavior, exhibit excessive lever-pressing unaccompanied by an attempt to collect a reward, which may be analogous to the excessive and unreasonable behavior seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Given that one of the most salient features of OCD is its selective response to treat...

Negative causation occurs when an absence serves as cause, effect, or causal intermediary. Negative causation is genuine causation, or so I shall argue. It involves no physical connection between cause and effect. Thus causes need not be physically connected to their effects. The terrorist presses the detonator button, and the bomb explodes. Here is causation. But I have not said which way the ...

Previous studies have investigated the viability of a go/ no-go discrimination procedure (pREP) for generating stimulus equivalence. During pREP training, participants receive positive feedback for pressing a bar after the successive presentation of two same-class stimuli and for not pressing after the presentation of two different-class stimuli. During pREP testing, the procedures are the same...

Interval schedules of reinforcement are known to generate habitual behavior, the performance of which is less sensitive to revaluation of the earned reward and to alterations in the action-outcome contingency. Here we report results from experiments using different types of interval schedules of reinforcement in mice to assess the effect of uncertainty, in the time of reward availability, on ha...

Binderless fiberboards from enzymatic hydrolysis lignin (EHL) and cotton stalk fibers were prepared under various manufacturing conditions, and their physico-mechanical properties were evaluated. Full factorial experimental design was used to assess the effect of fiber moisture content and pressing temperature on boards’ properties. In addition, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used ...

Background: Scant and equivocal research exists examining the effects of button-pressing on P300. Button-pressing may decrease P300 latency and amplitude. The melding of motor potentials and P300 may also confound studies of P300 topography, such as studies of temporal scalp-area asymmetries in schizophrenia. Method: P300 was measured on button-press and silent-count tasks in control subjects. ...

The pressing game on black-and-white graphs is the following: Given a graph G(V,E) with its vertices colored with black and white, any black vertex v can be pressed, which has the following effect: (a) all neighbors of v change color, i.e. white neighbors become black and vice versa, (b) all pairs of neighbors of v change connectivity, i.e. connected pairs become unconnected, unconnected ones b...

Entangled polymeric fluids, including high molecular weight polymer melts, constitute a fundamental example of viscoelastic fluids. In spite of enormous advances in understanding the molecular origin of their rheology and microscopic dynamics, there are several pressing puzzles, some of them strongly linked, that offer current and pressing challenges. We review the current state of the field an...

BACKGROUND Administration of psychomotor stimulants like amphetamine facilitates behavior in the presence of incentive distal stimuli, which have acquired the motivational properties of primary rewards through associative learning. This facilitation appears to be mediated by the mesolimbic dopamine system, which may also be involved in facilitating behavior in the presence of distal stimuli tha...