In a previous column we looked at some of the many ways that game designers use positive reinforcement and reward in MMOs. Positive reinforcement occurs whenever an action is accompanied by or results ...

I probably need to explain a couple of learning principles mentioned in the original post on jazz-band teaching and learning. One principle is operant conditioning, which is inherent in band classes.

We have all heard that the key to memorization is associating new information to be memorized with related information that we already have memorized. Why does this work? How does it work to form ...

New findings published in the journal Nature Neuroscience have shed light on a mysterious pathway between the reward center of the brain that is key to how we form habits, known as the basal ganglia, ...

Previous studies from our laboratory found that rats express increased preference for drug-paired stimuli following 2 or 5 weeks of protracted abstinence from chronic drug exposure as compared with ...

The behaviorists were like the orcs of psychology. Limited in vision, arrogant, belligerent and intolerant, they ruled the world of scientific psychology with an iron fist from the 1920s through the ...