Bilateral amygdala (AM) lesions prevent the acquisition of fear-related conditional responses (CRs) in rats, a result that is most commonly concluded to reflect a learning or memory deficit. An alternative hypothesis is that AM-lesioned animals fail to acquire certain fear CRs simply because they cannot perform these behaviors. This performance-deficit hypothesis is usually invoked in regard to...

It has been established in the animal literature that context generalization gradients flatten over time—performance of a learned behavior is more likely to be expressed in novel situations after longer retention intervals. We attempted to extend this finding to stimulus generalization among human participants. One hundred twenty participants were trained to trace mirror-reversed shapes using e...

Previous research has suggested that studying categories in either interleaved or blocked fashion can be beneficial for inductive learning. These conflicting results can be explained by considering that different category structures benefit differentially from blocked or interleaved study (Carvalho & Goldstone, 2013). However, memory-based theories have related the advantage of interleaved stud...