BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Conditioned fear may emerge in the absence of directly experienced conditioned stimulus (CS)--unconditioned stimulus (US) pairings. Here, we compared three pathways by which avoidance of the US may be acquired both directly (i.e., through trial-and-error instrumental learning) and indirectly (i.e., via verbal instructions and social observation). METHODS Following fe...

Kingston (J Comb Theory (A) 20:357–363, 1976) and Anderson (J Comb Theory (A) 23:363, 1977) show that the probability that a given contestant wins a bestof-2k+1 series of asymmetric, zero-sum, binary-outcome games is, for a large class of assignment rules, independent of which contestant is assigned the advantageous role in each component game. We design a laboratory experiment to test this hyp...

Recent research has revealed similarities in brain activity during observational learning and motor execution. However, whilst action develops visual, motor and afferent representations during acquisition, action-observation has been proposed to only develop visual-spatial learning via visual representation. In addition, it has been suggested that the vividness of visual representations are det...

The social sciences study various aspects of human behaviour – social, economic and political based on observational data. Observational data are inaccurate subject to simultaneity, seasonality, structural breaks, random variation too many interlocking variables masking the underlying causal patterns. During past two decades or so, use experimental (RCTs) has become widely popular acr...

A recent approach in social neuroscience has been the application of formal computational models for a particular social-cognitive process to neuroimaging data. Here we review preliminary findings from this nascent subfield, focusing on observational learning and strategic interactions. We present evidence consistent with the existence of three distinct learning systems that may contribute to s...

Objective: The present study aims at investigating the effects of behavioral therapy techniques through operant conditioning and observational learning on children’s aggression aged 4-6 years.  Methods: To this end, a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study with two experimental groups and a control group was designed. We used non-probability purposive sampling method to select 45...

Previous research has shown that people are capable of deriving correct predictions for previously unseen actions from passive observations of causal systems (Waldmann & Hagmayer, 2005). However, these studies were limited, since learning data were presented as tabulated data only, which may have turned the task more into a reasoning rather than a learning task. In two experiments, we therefore...

The neural structures involved in ongoing appetitive and/or observational learning behaviors remain largely unknown. Operant conditioning and observational learning were evoked and recorded in a modified Skinner box provided with an on-line video recording system. Mice improved their acquisition of a simple operant conditioning task by observational learning. Electrical stimulation of the obser...

Recently some results have been presented which show that certain kinds of deterministic descriptions and indeterministic descriptions are observationally equivalent (Werndl 2009a, Werndl 2011). These results prompt interesting philosophical questions, such as what exactly they show or whether the deterministic or indeterministic description is preferable. There is hardly any philosophical disc...