Topic: renewal

Animals integrate new information with their pre-existing memories to navigate their environment efficiently. Neuromodulation influences the balance between prior and current information, with β-adrenergic modulation playing a key role in memory and emotionally motivated processes (DOI: 10.1038/s41583-020-0360-9). We investigated the impact of central β-adrenergic activation on the renewal of a spatial appetitive learning task. Rats were trained to locate a low-probability reward in a T-Maze in context A, and the next day an extinction learning session took place in context B. After a day, the

Is context nothing more than "a backdrop where learning occurs?" In learning theory there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes a context. This implies a strict division between stimuli that act as cues and those that act as context. In extinction learning, a highly context-sensitive learning process, after the cessation of a behavior, its reappearance as renewal occurs after the change of context. In this study, we tested the ability of competing stimuli to act as context in an appetitive extinction learning paradigm in pigeons (Columba livia) . The ability of each stimulus to act as a