Rats with complete spinal transections are capable of acquiring a simple instrumentally trained response. If rats receive shock to one hind limb when the limb is extended (controllable shock), the spinal cord will learn to hold the leg in a flexed position that minimizes shock exposure. If shock is delivered irrespective of leg position, subjects do not exhibit an increase in flexion duration a...

background and objective: temporal lobe epilepsy (tle) usually leads to memory deficit. in this study, we tried to assess the effect of withania somnifera extract on the impaired learning and memory in the intrahippocampal kainate model of tle in the rat. materials & methods: male rats (n=32) were divided into sham, extract+sham, kainite, and kainite+extract. for induction of epilepsy, uni...

Young children typically demonstrate a transfer deficit, learning less from video than live presentations. Semantically meaningful context has been demonstrated to enhance learning in young children. We examined the effect of a semantically meaningful context on toddlers' imitation performance. Two- and 2.5-year-olds participated in a puzzle imitation task to examine learning from either a live...

The purpose of this study is to examine if PD (Parkinson disease) patients present a deficit in procedural motor learning. A portable robotic device is being used to generate forces that disturb subjects’ arm movements. Patients and age-matched controls have to learn to manipulate this “virtual mechanical environment.” Our preliminary results suggest that, indeed, PD patients present a deficit ...

Aged rats are known to have deficits in spatial learning behavior in the Morris water maze. We have found that aged rats also have deficits in NR2B protein expression and that the protein expression deficit is correlated with their performance in the Morris water maze. To test whether this NR2B deficit was sufficient to account for the behavioral deficit, we used antisense oligonucleotides to s...

OBJECTIVE To examine set shifting in a group of women previously diagnosed with anorexia nervosa who are now weight-restored (AN-WR) and then apply a biologically based computational model (Competition between Verbal and Implicit Systems [COVIS]) to simulate the pattern of category learning and set shifting performances observed. METHOD Nineteen AN-WR women and 35 control women (CW) were admi...

Antiepileptic medications are the frontline treatment for seizure conditions. However, these medications are not without cognitive side effects. Previously, our laboratory reported learning deficits in phenytoin and carbamazepine-treated rats. In the experiment reported here, the effects of valproic acid (VPA) have been studied using the same instrumental training tasks. VPA-treated rats displa...

Individuals learning together do so less effectively than individuals learning alone, an effect known as the collaborative encoding deficit (Barber, Rajaram, & Aron, 2010). In the present studies we examined whether providing participants with a warning about the collaborative encoding deficit would increase their encoding task performance, and reduce subsequent memory deficits. Across two expe...

Abstract There is a general consensus that developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is characterized by impairedmotor learning skills. However, actual studies of motor learning in DCD are scarce and, above all, inconsistent. The aims of the present study were therefore to explore the presumed presence of a motor learning deficit among individuals with DCD and to provide a synopsis of the curre...

The underlying defects in ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) are not yet clear. The current paper tests three existing theories: State Regulation, Cognitive Deficit, and Temporal Difference (TD) learning. We present computational simulations of the Matching Familiar Figures Task and compare these with the experimental results reported by Sonuga-Barke (2002). The TD model contains f...