Our laboratory has recently been involved in several  types of work. In the first, we studied the nature of individual differences in mice across a number of learning and memory tasks. Our work in this area is represented by these articles:
Locurto, C. & Scanlon, C. (1998). Individual differences and a spatial learning factor in two strains of mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112, 344-352. PDF
Locurto, C., Fortin, E., & Sullivan, R. (2003).The structure of individual differences in heterogeneous strain mice across problem types and motivational conditions. Genes, Brain, & Behavior, 2, 1-16. PDF
Locurto, Charles; Benoit, Andrea; Crowley, Caitlin; Miele, Andrea (2006).The Structure of Individual Differences in Batteries of Rapid Acquisition Tasks in Mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology. 120, 378-388. PDF
Locurto, C. (2007).Individual differences and animal personality. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2, 67-78. PDF
Carere, C. & Locurto, C. (2011). Interaction between animal personality and animal cognition. Current Zoology, 57, 491-498.
As an outgrowth of our work with mice, we also came across an interesting phenomenon in which mice shift their preference for where they choose to escape from aversive stimulation on a trial by trial basis. Our work on this topic is given below:
Locurto, C. Emidy, C., & Hannan, S. (2002).Mice (Mus musculus) learn a win-shift but not a win-stay contingency under water escape motivation.Journal of Comparative Psychology, 116, 308-312. PDF
Locurto, C. (2005). Further evidence that mice learn a win-shift but not a win-stay contingency under water escape motivation. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119, 387-393. PDF
Our current area of interest is implicit learning. In humans, this type of learning refers to .jpg) learning that occurs in the absence of awareness. In a nonhuman, implicit learning may be defined as learning that occurs in the absence of explicit contingencies of reinforcement to learn. The following articles, using cotton-top tamarins (the monkey on the home page), illustrates this work:
Locurto, C., Gagne, M., & Levesque, K. (2009).Implicit chaining in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 116-122. PDF
Locurto, C., Gagne, M., & Nutile, L. (2010). Characteristics of implicit chaining in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Animal Cognition, 13, 617-629.
|
