American Psychological Association Division 6
banner
apadivision6.bsky.social
American Psychological Association Division 6
@apadivision6.bsky.social
APA Div. 6: Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology
Div. 6 members are devoted to studying the biology of behavior. Their focus is on behavior and its relation to perception, learning, memory, cognition, motivation, and emotion.
Overall, skunks do have the ability to use visual patterns to solve problems even though they have poor vision and difficulty in learning the tasks without a lot of experience. doi.org/10.1037/com0...
APA PsycNet
doi.org
September 30, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Although the task was hard for the skunks to learn, they did finally solve it (after 1000s of trials). They seemed to be responding to visual patterns of contact and perceptual containment between food and painted lines. Only one skunk learned to pull supportive over unsupportive slats.
APA PsycNet
doi.org
September 30, 2025 at 6:52 PM
There were functional slats (real wooden slats that gave subjects both visual and functional information when manipulated) and purely representational slats that were painted lines that provided only visual information.
September 30, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Johnson-Ulrich et al. presented the slat-pulling task to three striped skunks to assess whether they could reason about visual patterns of support. doi.org/10.1037/com0...
APA PsycNet
doi.org
September 30, 2025 at 6:52 PM
The results provide additional support for greater attention to housing conditions for laboratory animals, as these may influence welfare as well as the experimental outcome in important ways.
September 9, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Rats raised in a “naturalistic” environment with wooden branches, tunnels, and a wooden shelter and variable location of food, water, and shelter displayed attenuated retrieval of context fear conditioning.
September 9, 2025 at 7:17 PM
In comparison to a standard-housing control group, rats that were raised in an enriched environment demonstrated shorter latency to learn a platform reversal in the Morris water maze, which may suggest that housing conditions influenced behavioral flexibility.
September 9, 2025 at 7:17 PM
The opportunity to interact with and adapt to a varied environment has cognitive benefits and may contribute to well-being. Laboratory animals are often maintained under conditions that do not afford such opportunities.
September 9, 2025 at 7:17 PM
The authors concluded that this may reflect a species-specific win-stay bias and the differential consequences of staying versus leaving (a conditioned-reinforcement account of intertemporal choice in patch-leaving contexts).
August 28, 2025 at 7:48 PM
For the binary-choice condition, the pigeons preferred the SS option. In Patch-L and Patch-S conditions, pigeons preferred to stay at the patch rather than leave in both cases, and even when the stay response was more effortful.
August 28, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Gomes-Ng et al. replicated this research using pigeons. There were three conditions, one with the binary-choice task and two patch-leaving tasks in which staying at a patch either led to an LL (Patch-L) or SS (Patch-S) reward. doi.org/10.1037/com0...
APA PsycNet
doi.org
August 28, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Enhanced context fear was more persistent than conventional context fear conditioning which has potentially optimistic implications for exposure-based treatments.

doi.org/10.1037/bne0000608
APA PsycNet
doi.org
August 5, 2025 at 8:02 PM