Self-testing strategies have powerful effects on learning and long-term retention. One popular method of self-testing is by using flashcards. Indeed, forty percent of students report using flashcards to study material (Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger, 2009). However, there has not yet been any research exploring differences in how learners use physical flashcards versus electronic flashcards. There may be a learning benefit for electronic flashcards because individuals are able to put more information on a card more quickly. However, there may be a learning benefit for physical flashcards because individuals can compensate for time with better quality information. In the present experiment, we investigated the potential differences in how individuals construct flashcards on index cards compared to electronic cards.
Participants were instructed to make flashcards over an article about how Hollywood films portray history (materials provided by Rawson & Kintsch, 2005). In the physical flashcard condition, participants were given 40 index cards and participants in the electronic flashcard condition were given a laptop to access Quizlet. All participants were instructed to make flashcards over the material as they would if they were preparing for a test over the material in the future. Participants in the electronic flashcard condition made more flashcards than did participants in the index card condition, and they also constructed flashcards in a method that promoted self-testing more than did participants in the index card condition. There were no differences in time spent making the flashcards between the two conditions. Thus, the way learners construct flashcards is different depending on if flashcards are being created physically or electronically. Future work is needed to explore potential differences in the quality of information placed on physical flashcards versus electronic flashcards.

Transfer of Change Detection to Novel Changes with Pigeons
Kenneth Leising, Lauren Cleland, Kierany Shelvin, Jackson White, & Cheyenne Elliott

The nature of working memory is frequently studied using change detection tasks. Change detection tasks involve presenting a sample and test display and asking subjects to report on changes in one or a group of stimuli across the delay; the changes can range from location to size, shape, color, and more. In this study, pigeons were trained with a location (“where”) change detection task using a touchscreen-equipped monitor. On each trial, reinforcement was delivered when a pigeon pecked at a visual object (colored circle) that changed position over a brief delay (0, 100, 1000 ms). Once training was complete, transfer tests with novel changes (size, shape, or color) were given. On a test trial, two sample items that differed in one of the dimensions were followed by a short delay (0 or 1000 ms) and then one of the two items changed within the same dimension (e.g., a square and a circle followed by two circles). The changed item now matched the non-changed item in every dimension. We found that pigeons were unable to transfer detection of location to detecting items that changed in the untrained dimension at test. Most recently, the pigeons underwent retraining for both location and color change-detection tasks. All subjects performed at or above chance on the color-change training within only a few sessions, but again failed to transfer at test. Subsequent tests focused on determining the source of this discrepancy.

Life History Theory predicts that growing up in certain environmental circumstances should promote the development of adult phenotypes that can survive in similar circumstances. Researchers have recently proposed that growing up poor should encourage eating strategies that promote survivability in resource scarce environments, with individuals reared in poorer circumstances eating comparable amounts of calories, regardless of energy need. Additional research indicates that childhood experiences with parental inconsistency, dangerous neighborhoods, development of an unpredictability schema (e.g., a mindset about the world, people, and future outcomes as unpredictable), and lowered body awareness predict this same pattern of results in adulthood. The purpose of the current research was to examine the impact of environmental conditions such as pregnancy stress experienced by the mother, family financial struggles, and predictability of the childhood environment on the emergence of eating in the absence of hunger in children ages 3-14. Results indicate that increased pregnancy stress and environmental unpredictability significantly predict eating in the absence of hunger.

Keywords: psychosocial stress, eating behavior, self-regulation, evolutionary psychology, health

Anxiety is an increasingly widespread mental health issue affecting a significant portion of the United States population. Further research in the field of mental health is beneficial to understanding the mechanisms that drive anxiety, and to discovering novel, therapeutic interventions. Using a rodent model to conduct this research is practical due to the morphological similarity of the rat brain to the human brain. We will examine anxiety- and fear-related responses in both male and female subjects that are subjected to either unpredictable or predictable threat. Unpredictable threats generate a state of anxiety, and predictable threats produce fear. Threat predictability will be manipulated by administration of temporally inconsistent, or temporally consistent foot shocks in an operant chamber. Equal numbers of males and females will be included within each group and the rats will be randomly assigned to either the temporally consistent or temporally inconsistent footshock condition. Animals will be tested over the course of three days; Day 1 is the contextual conditioning test day wherein the animal is exposed to the novel environment and the initial presentation of the foot shocks. Day 2 is the memory test day, where animals are returned to the test chamber, but no shock is given; day 3 . Day 3 is the reinstatement test where the animal is placed back into the chamber and one footshock is administered. Anxiety and fear will be assessed by measuring rearing (anxiety-related) and freezing (fear-related) behaviors in the test chamber on each test day. Sex differences in anxiety and fear that are generated by varying threat predictability will be determined. These results will provide insights into the role of potential sex differences in anxiety and fear-related behaviors.

It is commonly understood that as we age, memory tends to decline. Memory failures can have severe consequences for older adults if they forget important things, such as taking daily medication. Recently, researchers have found that younger and older adults tend to remember forgotten information as having been less important than remembered information (Castel et al., 2012; Witherby, Tauber, Rhodes, & Castel, in prep). This effect is called the forgetting bias. In the present experiment, we investigated why older and younger adults show the forgetting bias.
Older and younger adults studied words that were assigned a value indicating the importance of remembering the word. Following study, they took a free-recall test. After repeating the study-test procedure four times, participants took a surprise test. On the test, they were shown each word and asked (1) if they remembered it on the free-recall test and (2) to recall the point value assigned to it during the study phase. Younger and older adults used their memory judgment on the surprise test as an anchor for recalling the value. Specifically, words that were judged as remembered were given high values, whereas words judged as forgotten were given low values. Thus, one reason why both older and younger adults show the forgetting bias is because they rely on their memory of past test performance. Future work is needed to examine whether a forgetting bias is shown with more meaningful information as well as ways to eliminate the bias.

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that overt or covert echoic responding in the presence of an image is necessary for learning new verbal labels from exposure to contiguous presentations of words and images. (Horne & Lowe, 1996). This hypothesis predicts that seeing an image after hearing the associated verbal label leads to superior recall compared to seeing the image only before the verbal label is heard. Four children (3-6 years old) participated in a single-case design study that used an alternating-treatments design to evaluate the effects of stimulus presentation arrangement on subsequent recall of verbal labels. Each participant was exposed to six sessions that alternated across two conditions; word-first and image-first. In each session, the participants observed 20 pictures of four novel birds paired with their spoken names. In the word-first condition, the word and image were presented simultaneously but the image remained on the screen after the offset of the verbal stimulus. In the image-first condition, the image was initially displayed by itself, followed by the verbal label and the simultaneous offset of both. After each session received test for both verbal recall and recognition of the bird names. Compared to a prior experiment that was identical except that there was no overlap between image and word presentation, participants in the current experiment performed with slightly greater accuracy on the recall and recognition tests, but typically recalled only one or two labels after each session, with no difference between the image-first and the word-first condition.

The importance of cannabinoid receptors has risen in recent years due to the increasing number of states that have legalized marijuana; 28 states allow the usage of medical marijuana and 7 states allow recreational use ("28 Legal," 2017). Previous research from our lab has explored coping with multiple instances of reward loss when exposed to large, chronic doses of cannabinoid agonist WIN 55, 212-2 (WIN, 10 mg/kg). When chronically exposed rats received a consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) downshift of 32% to 4% sucrose, they were less able to cope with the subsequent autoshaping downshift of 12 pellets to 2 pellets. Additional autoshaping research from our lab has shown multiple downshifts in autoshaping to be successful in obtaining contrast effects. The present research combined this procedure with occasional acute doses of WIN (1 mg/kg) to determine if only one kind of downshift experience, autoshaping, was sufficient to produce less coping efficacy if repeated. Rats were randomly assigned to either WIN or vehicle control groups, and then trained in acquisition with discrete lever presentations where one lever was always followed by the delivery of 12 pellets, and a second lever was always followed by 2 pellets. After acquisition, rats received downshift sessions once per week, wherein the lever previously associated with 12 pellets was downshifted to only be followed by 2 pellets. Prior to each of 4 downshift sessions, rats received intraperitoneal injections of either WIN or vehicle solution. Lever presses to each lever during discrete “forced choice” and simultaneous “free choice” trials and head entries into the cup where food was delivered, or “goal entries,” were both recorded to assess preference and explore downshift effects. Although acute WIN administration did not affect lever preference relative to vehicle controls, it did result in decreased lever pressing in favor of goal tracking during the downshift. Therefore, WIN seems to encourage rats to be more focused on the outcome instead of responding to signals for the outcome, which may have implications for reducing impulsive behavior despite extensive training.

Prior work has found that religious individuals experience greater concerns about mortality when thinking about Jesus taking human form (Arrowood & Cox, 2018). Building on this, the present research examined how intrinsic religiosity (i.e., a more “mature” form of religion with a development for a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God) would moderate these effects. Christian individuals were asked to complete the Religious Orientation Scale, followed by reading an essay that either described Jesus as being fully human or a description of His lost years (i.e., neutral condition). The dependent variable consisted of people’s fear of mortality. The results revealed that low intrinsic individuals experienced a heightened fear of death following a creaturely Jesus prime. High intrinsic individuals, however, did not differ from neutral conditions. This study suggests that intrinsically valuing religion can serve as a buffer against existential anxieties stemming from humanistic concerns.

Anxiety disorders are a widespread and serious health concern currently affecting approximately 18% of the adult population per year (Kessler, et al., 2005); thus, there is a strong need to develop and improve therapeutic treatments for anxiety. Moreover, because sex differences in the prevalence of affective disorders in humans are well documented, this study involves both male and female rats. Vocalizations allow for a dynamic assessment of an animal’s emotional state. The ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) of rats are produced at frequencies above the level of human hearing. USVs are often used as a tool to assess the emotional state of rats. Previous research has identified two main call types for rats: 22 kHz (related to strongly negative emotion) and 50 kHz. 50 kHz calls can then be further broken down into constant frequency (CF) and frequency modulated (FM) subtypes. FM calls are produced with a bandwidth greater than 15 kHz; these calls are related to positive emotional states. Whereas, CF calls are produced with a constant frequency and a bandwidth less than 10 kHz. Our lab hypothesizes that CF 50 kHz calls are expressions of anxiety in rats. Our lab has previously explored the vocalizations of rats across a continuum of negative affective state (i.e., from anxiety to fear) within a single testing session using a sequence of temporally consistent mild footshocks. The current experiment explores USV production in male and female rats when the temporal predictability was reduced by randomizing the time between footshocks. We utilized an unpredictable footshock paradigm with the goal of increasing or prolonging a state of anxiety as compared to our previous procedure. In this paradigm, shocks were administered across three successive days: on Day 1, mild footshocks were administered in a pseudo-randomized pattern, on Day 2, subjects were returned to the same context but did not receive footshocks, and on Day 3, a single reinstatement shock was administered. Differences in USV calling behavior across test days will be explored in male and female rats. In addition to USVs, rearing and freezing behavior were also recorded and used to assess anxiety and fear. These results will enhance our understanding of vocal expression of emotional states in rats, which improves the dominant animal model used to study anxiety disorders and potential therapeutic interventions.

Discrimination learning involves responses (e.g., cheering for TCU) that are rewarded under some conditions (e.g., at a TCU football game) but not others (e.g., in the library). Occasion setting involves a higher-order discrimination in which one stimulus (i.e., the occasion setter) signals whether response to a second stimulus (i.e., a discriminative stimulus) will be rewarded (e.g., followed by food) or not. In the current experiments, pigeons were trained in a spatial occasion setting task in which an occasion setter (i.e., a colored background) provided information about if and where to respond relative to a discriminative stimulus that served as a landmark (i.e., a colored box embedded within the occasion setter). These experiments examined the effect of spatial ambiguity on occasion setting. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained on a task in which spatially stable occasion setters gave information about where to respond relative to spatially unstable landmarks (←YB, ZB→, ←WA, XA→, ←C→). In Experiment 2, a different set of pigeons were trained with both a spatially unstable and two spatially stable occasion setters paired with landmarks that were spatially unstable (←WA, WB→, ←XA, YB→, ←C→). Transfer tests showed that the stable occasion setters were able to control responding to spatially unstable landmarks that they had not been paired with in training.