Learning in conditions of selective changes of brain serotonin and norepinephrine in rats [proceedings].
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Mental images constructed after visual examination of a spatial configuration or after processing a verbal description of that configuration have been shown to share similar properties, in particular the capacity to preserve metric information contained in the configuration represented. In the present study, we investigated the properties of mental images constructed under learning conditions resulting from the combination of a visual or a verbal mode of acquisition and a survey or route perspective. Participants memorized a virtual environment (a garden containing six objects) under one of four learning conditions: (a) viewing a map of the garden (visual-survey); (b) viewing a video presentation of a journey along the path around the garden (visual-route); (c) listening to a verbal description of the map of the garden (verbal-survey); and (d) listening to a verbal description of the journey around the garden (verbal-route). The participants were then invited to compare the distances separating objects in the garden mentally. Experiment 1, where the pairs of distances to be compared had a common starting point, revealed that the frequency of correct responses was higher, and response times were shorter when participants had learned about the environment visually rather than by a verbal description. The conditions involving a survey perspective resulted in a higher frequency of correct responses and shorter response times than those involving a route perspective. Lastly, a symbolic distance effect was obtained in the first three conditions, in that the greater the difference between the two distances being compared, the higher the frequency of correct responses, and the shorter the response times. Experiment 2, where the pairs of distances had different starting points, replicated these results, although longer response times revealed that the comparison process was more costly. Taken together, these findings support the view that mental spatial representations derived from different sources and adopting different perspectives contain genuine metric properties, except when the verbal modality and the route perspective are combined during learning.
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Wistar Kyoto (WKY) and Wistar rats were observed in four tests; the open field test (OFT), the conditioned defensive burying (DB) test, and two tests which are considered animal models of depressive behavior, namely the Porsolt forced-swim test (FST) and the shuttlebox escape responding following exposure to inescapable shock, that is, learned helplessness (LH). The four tests were administered according to a semirandomized schedule to control for sequence effects. All rats were later exposed to water-restraint stress and stomachs were subsequently inspected for ulcers. Stress ulcer severity was greater in WKY rats. WKY rats, as compared to Wistar rats, were hypoactive in the OFT, did not engage in DB, rapidly acquired the LH task, and were significantly more immobile in the FST. The FST was positively correlated with behaviors in the LH procedure and, to a lesser degree, with DB, but these relationships were observed only with WKY rats, not Wistar rats. The data suggested that the use of WKY rats represented a more sensitive procedure for detecting possible relationships between putative animal models of depressive behavior.
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Intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) biphasically affects performance in tests of learning and memory. In the present study, we used CRF, urocortin (Ucn), a recently cloned CRF homologue, and CRF receptor antagonists, to determine which CRF receptor subtype(s) mediate the memory modulating effects of CRF receptor agonists in male Wistar rats. Under difficult learning conditions (massed trials), i.c.v. pretreatment with CRF or Ucn facilitated the acquisition of spatial navigation in the Morris water maze in a non-dose-dependent fashion (optimal doses of 0.1 and 0.03 microg, respectively). Under less difficult learning conditions (spaced trials), both peptides impaired water maze performance. In addition, with i.c.v. posttraining treatment, the peptides were equipotent (1.0 microg) in facilitating the consolidation of passive avoidance learning. The performance-enhancing effects of Ucn in both water maze and passive avoidance paradigms were reversed by i.c.v. pretreatment with D-Phe CRF(12-41) (2.5, 5 microg), a broad CRF(1)/CRF(2) receptor antagonist, or antalarmin (10 microg), a potent, nonpeptide, CRF(1) selective receptor antagonist. Thus, Ucn shares CRF's memory-modulating effects, and these effects appear to be mediated via the CRF(1) receptor. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that CRF receptor agonists affect performance in tests of learning and memory by increasing arousal.
Aims of this study were to analyze the long-term effects of postovulatory aging of mouse oocytes on 1) reproductive traits of parental (F(0)) and first (F(1))-generation females (pregnancy rate, gestation length, litter size, perinatal death, and sex ratio of offspring) and 2) developmental and behavioral variables of F(1) and second-generation (F(2)) offspring (birth weight and weight gain during preweaning development, postnatal day of attainment of immediate righting, spontaneous motor activity, and passive and active conditioned learning ability). Hybrid (C57BL/6JIco x CBA/JIco) females were artificially inseminated at 13 h (control group) or 22 h (oocyte-aged group) after GnRH injection. Experimental (oocyte-aged group) F(0) females exhibited lower pregnancy rate, shortened gestation length, decreased litter size, higher perinatal death of their pups, and increased percentage of male offspring compared to control F(0) females. Postovulatory aging of oocytes was also associated with increased number of growth-retarded pups, delayed development of the righting reflex, and higher spontaneous motor activity and emotionality of F(1) offspring. Postovulatory aging of F(0) oocytes did not affect birth weight, weight gain during preweaning development, passive and active conditioned learning ability of F(1) offspring, or reproductive traits of F(1) females or developmental and behavior variables of F(2) offspring.
Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) received two tests of visual selective attention, together with tests of spatial and visual recognition memory and visuospatial conditional learning previously used to show deficits early in the course of DAT. One set of attentional tests compared visual discrimination learning along intra- and extra-dimensional shifts, using a "total change" design. In the 12 DAT patients capable of attempting the extra-dimensional shift (subgroup 1), performance was equivalent to that of controls. This subgroup was also unimpaired at simple and compound discrimination learning and reversal and an intra-dimensional shift. They were as accurate as controls on a visual search task requiring matching of stimuli on two dimensions with variable numbers of alternatives, but were significantly impaired in the tests of recognition memory and learning. By contrast, the other 13 patients showed marked impairments in the attentional tasks. This subgroup was also significantly worse than subgroup 1 in performance on the visual recognition and conditional learning tasks, and showed greater severity on most of the clinical ratings of dementia. The sparing of attentional shifting in patients early in the course of DAT is contrasted with the impairments previously described in patients with Parkinson's disease with only mild or absent memory loss. The implications of this double dissociation of deficits for understanding the neural bases of the cognitive deficits in these two neurodegenerative diseases are discussed and their significance for the staging of DAT is considered.
In the present work, a study of the number of functional receptors has been made with 3HQNB given to resting awaken animals during a learning process. Ageing leads to a decrease in the ability of learning associated with an increase in the number of large movements. The number of cholinergic receptors is also reducel if we compare 22 month old animals with 4 month old animals maintained under usual conditions. Learning conditioning leads to a stimulation of the cholinergic system with a release of acetylcholine. The mediator takes the 3HQNB out of its fixation areas which causes an apparent decrease in the number of receptors. This result is more significant in young animals than in aged ones because of the possibility of activation in the cholinergic system. The treatment by dihydroergotoxine partially re-establishes the learning abilities in animals and, at the same time, increases the number of cholinergic receptors This effect could explain the actions of this drug on the memory process in ageing persons.
In Experiment 1 (within subjects) and Experiment 2 (between subjects) it was shown that the sequential training of pigeons on a color discrimination and then on its reversal, each in a different floor-tilt/texture context, failed to produce conditional control of discriminative performance by those contexts. Daily alternation between the two problems (with correlated contexts) was successful, however. In each of these experiments conditional control was better reflected in generalization test performance in extinction than during sessions of training with reinforcement.
Reduced working memory capacity seems to characterize the memory system of individuals from the schizophrenia spectrum. A probabilistic category learning task was designed in order to empirically test the hypothesis that deficient inhibitory control over the contents of working memory may be a fundamental cognitive abnormality of psychometrically identified schizotypal individuals. Two groups of participants were recruited on the basis of their responses on scales measuring psychotic-like experiences in a self-report schizotypy questionnaire. Simple stimuli were presented visually, and participants were instructed to glean the strength of the connection between pairs of stimuli. The experimental task comprised several learning conditions which were designed to assess predictions derived from the inhibition-deficit hypothesis. Working memory-dependent and working memory-independent task conditions allowed to examine the specificity of the putative inhibition deficit. The subjective strength of connections between pairs of stimuli was doubly dissociated as a function of schizotypy (low scorers, high scorers) and learning condition (discriminative, non-discriminative), but only when there was a delay between the to-be-associated stimuli, i.e. when the task was working memory-dependent. The pattern of results is consistent with the inhibition-deficit hypothesis which conjectures that the flow of information through short-term memory features one serious flaw in individuals from the schizophrenia spectrum, namely the occurrence of mnemonic intrusions from long-term memory into working memory.
Rats with perirhinal cortex lesions were compared with sham controls on a conditional discrimination in which saccharin was paired with LiCl in context 1, but paired with saline in context 2. Perirhinal-lesioned rats were slightly slower to acquire the discrimination but reached control levels by the end of acquisition. Both groups showed transfer to familiar tap water, consuming less in context 1 than in context 2. Unlike sham rats, perirhinal rats failed to show an aversion to context 1 on a place choice test. These data provide neuroanatomical support for the postulated difference between Pavlovian conditioning and conditional learning.
Errorless learning has been shown to be very successful in the rehabilitation of memory problems particularly in patients with severe forms of memory impairment. Much of this research has focused on testing knowledge of specific details studied, ignoring any additional, higher-level knowledge that patients may have acquired during the learning process. Hence, it is pertinent to ask whether errorless learning is equally successful in the acquisition of high and low-level knowledge. In this paper, we present results of several studies comparing the effectiveness of errorless and standard trial-and-error methods in acquisition of high and low-level knowledge in people diagnosed with dementia and non-impaired controls. In Study 1, participants were asked to learn novel face-name-occupation associations; and knowledge across a range of levels, from very general (i.e., high-level) to very specific (i.e., low-level), was examined. For patients with probable Alzheimer's disease and controls there was evidence of increased benefit from errorless training in general, but the technique was most beneficial for patients attempting to retrieve specific detail. Study 2 was conducted to address the problem raised by the failure in Study 1 to manipulate learning condition at our highest knowledge level. This novel manipulation was successful, but neither of the patients received the standard benefit from errorless training. Study 3, involving a small group of dementia patients with mixed diagnoses, was conducted to replicate findings from Study 1. Results from the group analysis confirmed that the benefit obtained from errorless learning increased as a function of knowledge specificity, but again several patients failed to show a consistent effect of learning condition. Implications for use of the errorless technique are discussed.
Cognition in transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been predominantly characterized in explicit spatial orientation tasks. However, dementia in AD encompasses also implicit memory systems. In the present study a line of transgenic mice (TgCRND8) encoding a double mutated allele of the human amyloid precursor protein (APP) genes was evaluated in an implicit associative learning task of conditioned taste aversion (CTA). CTA is a form of Pavlovian classical conditioning, in which a mouse learns to avoid a novel taste of saccharine (conditioned stimulus) paired with an experimentally induced (systemic injection of lithium chloride) nausea (unconditioned stimulus). In contrast to conditioned non-Tg mice, TgCRND8 APP mice developed weaker aversion against saccharine and quickly increased its consumption in repeated tests. These results indicate that TgCRND8 mice show a significant impairment not only in explicit spatial memory, as has been previously shown [Nature 408 (2000) 979], but also in implicit memory. Control experiments confirmed that TgCRND8 and non-Tg mice had comparable taste sensitivities in response to appetitive as well as aversive tastes. The study suggests that the CTA paradigm can be a sensitive tool to evaluate deficits in implicit associative learning in APP transgenic mouse models of AD.
Event-related fMRI was used to dissociate the neural systems involved in category learning with and without awareness. Ten subjects performed a speeded response category learning task. Functional MR images were acquired during both explicit and implicit learning conditions. Behavioral data showed evidence of learning in both conditions. Functional imaging data showed different activation patterns in implicit and explicit trials. Decreased activation in extrastriate region V3 was found with implicit learning, and increased activation in V3, the medial temporal lobe, and frontal regions were found with explicit learning. These results support the theory that implicit and explicit learning utilize dissociable neural systems. Moreover, in both the implicit and explicit conditions a similar pattern of decreased activation was found in parietal regions. This commonality suggests that these dissociable systems also operate in parallel.
MOTIVATION: Identifying bacteriophages (phages) within metagenomic sequences is essential for understanding microbial community dynamics. Transformer-based foundation models have been successfully employed to address various biological challenges. However, these models are typically pre-trained with self-supervised tasks that do not consider label variance in the pre-training data. This presents a challenge for phage identification as pre-training on mixed bacterial and phage data may lead to information bias due to the imbalance between bacterial and phage samples. RESULTS: To overcome this limitation, we proposed a novel conditional BERT framework that incorporates label classes as special tokens during pre-training. Specifically, our conditional BERT model attaches labels directly during tokenization, introducing label constraints into the model's input. Additionally, we introduced a new fine-tuning scheme that enables the conditional BERT to be effectively utilized for classification tasks. This framework allows the BERT model to acquire label-specific contextual representations from mixed sequence data during pre-training and applies the conditional BERT as a classifier during fine-tuning, and we named the fine-tuned model as PharaCon. We evaluated PharaCon against several existing methods on both simulated sequence datasets and real metagenomic contig datasets. The results demonstrate PharaCon's effectiveness and efficiency in phage identification, highlighting the advantages of incorporating label information during both pre-training and fine-tuning. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code and associated data can be accessed at https://github.com/Celestial-Bai/PharaCon.
In 2 experiments, the authors examined the effects of schemas on the subjective experience of remembering. Participants entered a room that was set up to look like a graduate student's office under intentional or incidental learning conditions. They later took a recognition memory test that included making remember-know judgments. In Experiment 1, they were tested during the same session; in Experiment 2 they were tested either during the same session or after a 48-hr delay. Consistent with the authors' predictions, memory for atypical objects was especially likely to be experienced in the remember sense. In addition, false remember judgments rose dramatically after the 48-hr delay, especially for participants in the incidental learning condition. Results are discussed in terms of schema theory, fuzzy-trace theory, and the distinctiveness heuristic.
PURPOSE: This study aimed to compare the effects of computer-assisted, text-based and computer-and-text learning conditions on the performances of 3 groups of medical students in the pre-clinical years of their programme, taking into account their academic achievement to date. A fourth group of students served as a control (no-study) group. METHOD: Participants were recruited from the pre-clinical years of the training programmes in 2 medical schools in Japan, Jichi Medical School near Tokyo and Kochi Medical School near Osaka. Participants were randomly assigned to 4 learning conditions and tested before and after the study on their knowledge of and skill in performing an abdominal examination, in a multiple-choice test and an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), respectively. Information about performance in the programme was collected from school records and students were classified as average, good or excellent. Student and faculty evaluations of their experience in the study were explored by means of a short evaluation survey. RESULTS: Compared to the control group, all 3 study groups exhibited significant gains in performance on knowledge and performance measures. For the knowledge measure, the gains of the computer-assisted and computer-assisted plus text-based learning groups were significantly greater than the gains of the text-based learning group. The performances of the 3 groups did not differ on the OSCE measure. Analyses of gains by performance level revealed that high achieving students' learning was independent of study method. Lower achieving students performed better after using computer-based learning methods. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that computer-assisted learning methods will be of greater help to students who do not find the traditional methods effective. Explorations of the factors behind this are a matter for future research.