Lucia Jacobs
University of California, Berkeley, Psychology, Faculty Member
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Under natural conditions, wild animals encounter situations where previously rewarded actions do not lead to reinforcement. In the laboratory, a surprising omission of reinforcement induces behavioral and emotional responses described as... more
Under natural conditions, wild animals encounter situations where previously rewarded actions do not lead to reinforcement. In the laboratory, a surprising omission of reinforcement induces behavioral and emotional responses described as frustration. Frustration can lead to aggressive behaviors and to the persistence of noneffective responses, but it may also lead to new behavioral responses to a problem, a potential adaptation. We assessed the responses to inaccessible reinforcement in free-ranging fox squirrels (Sciurus niger). We trained squirrels to open a box to obtain food reinforcement, a piece of walnut. After 9 training trials, squirrels were tested in 1 of 4 conditions: a control condition with the expected reward, an alternative reinforcement (a piece of dried corn), an empty box, or a locked box. We measured the presence of signals suggesting arousal (e.g., tail flags and tail twitches) and found that squirrels performed fewer of these behaviors in the control condition and increased certain behaviors (tail flags, biting box) in the locked box condition, compared to other experimental conditions. When faced with nonreinforcement, that is, frustration, squirrels increased the number of interactions with the apparatus and spent more time interacting with the apparatus. This study of frustration responses in a free-ranging animal extends the conclusions of captive studies to the field and demonstrates that fox squirrels show short-term negatively valenced responses to the inaccessibility, omission, and change of reinforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory formation for scenes in both children and adults. The development in children and adolescents of successful memory encoding for scenes has been... more
Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory formation for scenes in both children and adults. The development in children and adolescents of successful memory encoding for scenes has been associated with increased activation in PFC, but not MTL, regions. However, evidence suggests that a functional subregion of the MTL that supports scene perception, located in the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), goes through a prolonged maturation process. Here we tested the hypothesis that maturation of scene perception supports the development of memory for complex scenes. Scenes were characterized by their levels of complexity defined by the number of unique object categories depicted in the scene. Recognition memory improved with age, in participants ages 8-24, for high-, but not low-, complexity scenes. High-complexity compared to low-complexity scenes activated a network of regions including the posterior PHG. The difference in activations for hig...
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Although Norway rats are naturally gregarious, males typically live alone at some point during adulthood. DiVerent social ecolo- gies often require diVerent learning strategies and also modulate response to stressors and gonadal... more
Although Norway rats are naturally gregarious, males typically live alone at some point during adulthood. DiVerent social ecolo- gies often require diVerent learning strategies and also modulate response to stressors and gonadal development. To measure eVects of the social environment on the interaction between cognition and emotion during aging, we focused on a natural learning context and devised the sectored
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Research Interests: Food, Multidisciplinary, NUTS, Female, Animals, and 6 moreMale, Sciuridae, Feeding Behavior, PLoS one, Time Factors, and Seasons
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Although Norway rats are naturally gregarious, males typically live alone at some point during adulthood. Different social ecologies often require different learning strategies and also modulate response to stressors and gonadal... more
Although Norway rats are naturally gregarious, males typically live alone at some point during adulthood. Different social ecologies often require different learning strategies and also modulate response to stressors and gonadal development. To measure effects of the social environment on the interaction between cognition and emotion during aging, we focused on a natural learning context and devised the sectored foraging field, a progressively difficult spatial navigation task. Here, we describe how this apparatus and protocol permits multiple learning strategies in a minimally stressful environment, enabling finely graded analyses of cognition and emotionality. Male Sprague-Dawley rats living alone throughout adulthood adopted a sex-typic discernible spatial strategy. In contrast, males housed in group contexts utilized an algorithmic kinesthetic strategy, repeating the same motor action until they found food. Removal of food and distal, but not local cues, elicited anxious alertness, particularly in group-housed males. Cognitive performance of group-housed rats subsequent to food and cue removal was significantly impaired, yet enhanced in isolates.
Research Interests: Spatial cognition, Stress, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Anxiety, Hippocampus, and 15 moreAnimals, Male, Social Isolation, Social Environment, Learning Strategies, Cognitive Performance, Spatial Behavior, Rats, Spatial navigation, Enriched Environment, ANXIETY, Exploratory Behavior, Psychological Stress, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Research Interests: Animal Behavior, Seasonality, Female, Animals, Male, and 15 moreRegression Analysis, Neuronal Plasticity, Sciuridae, Medical Physiology, Neurons, Feeding Behavior, Seasonal variation, Dentate Gyrus, Age Factors, Seasons, Comparative Neurology, Neurosciences, Breeding season, Cell count, and brain size
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In a 12-year study involving 191 radio-tracked Merriam's kangaroo rats and 337 subcutaneous radio implantations, females were killed by predators at a rate of 0.0054 per radio-bearing night and males at a rate of 0.0116. Both the... more
In a 12-year study involving 191 radio-tracked Merriam's kangaroo rats and 337 subcutaneous radio implantations, females were killed by predators at a rate of 0.0054 per radio-bearing night and males at a rate of 0.0116. Both the mortality rate and the sex difference therein declined over the course of several nights after radio implantation. Females reduced their excursions from the day burrow for the first few nights after radio implantation, whereas males exhibited little if any such inhibition of movement. This sexually differentiated behavioural response to the transmitters is a likely source of the sexually differentiated mortality patterns.
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Research Interests: Cognition, Morphometry, Information Processing, Natural Selection, Biological Sciences, and 15 moreBrain Mapping, Anatomy, Brain evolution, Hippocampus, Female, Animals, Male, Body Size, Biological evolution, Foraging Behavior, Homing Behavior, Dipodomys, Motor activity, brain size, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Sex differences in spatial learning are found in many species of mammals and even in invertebrates. Results from laboratory mouse studies, however, have been inconsistent in comparison to studies of humans, laboratory rats and wild rodent... more
Sex differences in spatial learning are found in many species of mammals and even in invertebrates. Results from laboratory mouse studies, however, have been inconsistent in comparison to studies of humans, laboratory rats and wild rodent species. Here we re-examined this question in C57BL/6J mice that were exposed to enriched environments using two tasks, an object recognition task and a place learning task where mice were motivated by exploratory drive, not aversive conditioning or food restriction. Using these methods, we found a female advantage for object recognition, similar to the female advantage found in humans and laboratory rats. In the place learning task, male performance was unimpaired by intra-maze cue deletion but impaired by extra-maze cue masking. Female mice, in contrast, were able to navigate accurately under both cue conditions. In summary, by utilizing testing and housing methods that were more species appropriate, we found sex-specific patterns of cue encoding and place learning in better accordance with prior results from other mammalian species. The implication of these results is that the C57BL/6J mouse is an appropriate model for the study of cognitive sex differences in mammals.
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How females and males differ in performance in object recognition tasks appears to vary among mammalian species, with female superiority found in the laboratory rat and humans but not in the laboratory mouse. Here we assessed sex... more
How females and males differ in performance in object recognition tasks appears to vary among mammalian species, with female superiority found in the laboratory rat and humans but not in the laboratory mouse. Here we assessed sex differences in object recognition in C57BL/J6 mice by varying the similarity between objects to be learned. Females outperformed males in object recognition when the novel object was similar to a previously learned object.