Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “learning”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 451 records · Page 25Linked to original sources
PubMed2001

Spatial learning in the guinea pig: cued versus non-cued learning, sex differences, and comparison with rats.

This paper provides the first report of spatial learning in guinea pigs using the Morris water maze (MWM). Male and female guinea pigs were trained for 5 consecutive days (8 trials/day; acquisition phase) in either the visible (cued) or the hidden (non-cued) platform version of the MWM. In both tests, guinea pigs learned to navigate to the escape platform, as indicated by a decrease in escape latency over the 5 training days. There were no sex differences in either test version. A comparison of guinea pigs and male Wistar rats showed that performance during acquisition training was not different for the two species in the visible platform test, but rats performed better during the early training days in the hidden platform test. A retention test (probe trial) was given 5 days after the last acquisition training day. Again, there was no sex difference, and no difference between guinea pigs and rats. Finally, acquisition of a new escape response to a shifted platform location was equivalent for rats and guinea pigs of both sexes. These results demonstrate that guinea pigs show robust cued and non-cued learning in the MWM. Both acquisition and retention performance in guinea pigs is similar to that in rats, even though rats appear to have a slight advantage in the acquisition of non-cued, spatial information in this test. We conclude that the MWM provides a valuable paradigm to assess behavior and learning/memory in the guinea pig.

Animals↗
PubMed2000

Learning-associated activation of nuclear MAPK, CREB and Elk-1, along with Fos production, in the rat hippocampus after a one-trial avoidance learning: abolition by NMDA receptor blockade.

It is widely accepted that the formation of long-term memory (LTM) requires neuronal gene expression, protein synthesis and the remodeling of synaptic contacts. From mollusk to mammals, the cAMP/PKA/CREB signaling pathway has been shown to play a pivotal role in the establishment of LTM. More recently, the MAPK cascade has been also involved in memory processing. Here, we provide evidence for the participation of hippocampal PKA/CREB and MAPK/Elk-1 pathways, via activation of NMDA receptors, in memory formation of a one-trial avoidance learning in rats. Learning of this task is associated with an activation of p44 and p42 MAPKs, CREB and Elk-1, along with an increase in the levels of the catalytic subunit of PKA and Fos protein in nuclear-enriched hippocampal fractions. These changes were blocked by the immediate posttraining intra-hippocampal infusion of APV, a selective blocker of glutamate NMDA receptors, which renders the animals amnesic for this task. Moreover, no changes were found in control-shocked animals. Thus, inhibitory avoidance training in the rat is associated with an increase in the protein product of an IEG, c-fos, which occurs concomitantly with the activation of nuclear MAPK, CREB and Elk-1. NMDA receptors appear to be a necessary upstream step for the activation of these intracellular cascades during learning.

2-Amino-5-phosphonovalerate↗
PubMed2000

Development of key neurons for learning stimulates learning ability in Lymnaea stagnalis.

The pond snails, Lymnaea stagnalis, change their ability of conditioned taste aversion (CTA) during their development, for example, stage 29 embryos can acquire the CTA, whereas immature snails come to use a long-term memory to maintain the conditioned response. We thus examined the relationships between the learning ability and the development of key neurons (cerebral giant cells: CGCs) for this CTA. The immunoreactivity of serotonin, which is a main neurotransmitter employed in the feeding circuitry, was first observed in the CGCs at the stage 29. After hatching, the CGCs developed their neuropile faster than other cells in the buccal and cerebral ganglia, resulting in their early innervation at the immature stage. The present results, therefore, indicate that the development of key neurons for learning stimulates the developmental changes in learning ability.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

NR2B downregulation in a forebrain region required for avian vocal learning is not sufficient to close the sensitive period for song learning.

The neural changes that limit the sensitive period for avian song development are unknown, but neurons in a forebrain region critical for song learning, the lMAN, exhibit experience-driven changes in NMDAR subunit expression that could regulate sensitive period closure. Specifically, NR2B levels in lMAN decrease during song acquisition, potentially reducing synaptic plasticity by decreasing NMDAR EPSC duration and/or affecting NMDAR-coupled intracellular cascades. While rearing birds in isolation extends the sensitive period and also delays the developmental changes in NR2B expression and NMDAR physiology, recent work indicates that a transition to faster NMDAR currents does not preclude further song learning. However, NR2B mRNA expression in isolates remains elevated beyond the age at which NMDAR currents shorten, leaving open the possibility that NR2B levels regulate closure of the sensitive period through effects other than those mediated by NMDAR current duration. To determine whether the experience-driven decrease in NR2B expression in lMAN closes the sensitive period, we promoted this change in gene expression either by treating isolation-reared zebra finches briefly with testosterone (T-isolates) or by allowing males limited access to conspecific song (pre-exposed isolates). We then assessed if these birds could acquire song from tutors after the normal close of the sensitive period. Despite a normal decline in NR2B expression, T-isolate and pre-exposed isolate birds learned tutor songs heard from d65-90, while normally reared birds did not. These findings suggest that the normal decline in NR2B expression with lMAN is not sufficient for sensitive period closure.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Changing physician prescribing patterns through problem-based learning: an interactive, teleconference case-based education program and review of problem-based learning.

BACKGROUND: Although asthma guidelines have recommended the use of anti-inflammatory controller medications since 1991, studies have consistently shown widespread failure to follow the guidelines. Major barriers include lack of knowledge and the inability to operationalize knowledge. Improved continuing medical education methods should result in more effective learning by physicians and other health care professionals, leading to better adherence to guidelines, resulting in better outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of an interactive, case-based, educational intervention, also known as problem-based learning, using a series of interactive, case-based teleconferences. METHODS: A series of interactive, case-based teleconferences was completed with 20 primary care physicians. Each case involved a child aged 16 months to 12 years with asthma. A 12-month analysis of physician prescribing patterns was conducted. RESULTS: Program acceptance by the 20 physicians was uniformly positive. Significant improvement was noted, with an overall increase in controller use. Review of prescription data showed an increase in inhaled corticosteroid use from an average of 2.54 to 7.76 refills per month for the 6 months after the intervention (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: After participating in a unique educational intervention-problem-based learning using interactive, case-based teleconferences-the prescribing patterns of physicians were altered significantly toward better adherence to asthma guidelines, as demonstrated by an increased use of anti-inflammatory controller medications (inhaled corticosteroids and leukotriene antagonists).

Anti-Asthmatic Agents↗
PubMed1997

Learning to learn: step one for survival in the new paradigm.

New challenges require new approaches and many of the suggested solutions are in conflict with how we were taught in our formative years. Team work in high school and college was mostly found in sports-related activities. Collaboration in a classroom was not encouraged and could be viewed as cheating. We did not learn to share knowledge in a group nor to group problem solving, yet we are told that those are the very skills we need to have to survive in today's workplace. The first step to success is to look at how we were taught to learn and make the shift to learning in a different manner.

Cooperative Behavior↗
PubMed2003

Putting the action into learning: the experience of an action learning set.

As part of a practice development initiative the nursing staff of a special care nursery unit chose to begin an action learning set. The set was established to enable nursing staff to participate in a learning activity which focused on personal as well as team development. This was facilitated by a practice development nurse (researcher) who although not part of the nursing team, worked within the unit on a supernumerary basis throughout the study period. The set members identified and explored issues from clinical practice through a process of questioning, reflection, and challenging one another with an aim to improving the care delivered to patients and their families. This paper describes the process involved in establishing the set and the journey the set has taken since its inception in May 2002. The main areas covered in this paper include an overview of the practice development initiative, a brief outline of action learning including the processes involved, how the set was established, what it is like to be a set member, the development of skills and knowledge, the personal growth that has resulted from participation, and how the set is being evaluated.

Australia↗
PubMed1999

Learning color words involves learning a system of mappings.

This research examines the difficulty children encounter when acquiring 2 specific sets of adjectives, color and size words, and suggests that children must acquire a system of mapping in learning these words. Children were assessed on 4 types of mappings (word-word maps, property-property maps, word-property maps, and word-word-property maps) by completing 3 color tasks. Children also participated in comparable tasks for size words. In Study 1, 13 two-year-olds were followed longitudinally at 3-week intervals. In Study 2, 56 two-year-olds participated in a cross-sectional replication. The results indicate that children acquire color maps in a characteristic order. Children demonstrated a different pattern of acquisition for size words. The results suggest that learning word associations may promote color word acquisition and that learning color words may promote selective attention to color.

Attention↗
PubMed1985

Learned helplessness and learned resourcefulness: effects of noncontingent success and failure on individuals differing in self-control skills.

We designed two experiments to investigate the role of self-control processes in learned-helplessness studies by assessing the differential reactions to uncontrollability of subjects who presumably had either a rich (high resourceful, or HR) or poor (low resourceful, or LR) repertoire of self-control skills. HR and LR subjects received noncontingent success feedback, failure feedback, or no feedback on a task that ostensibly assessed "therapeutic abilities." Subjects were subsequently tested on insolvable puzzles (Experiment 1) or on solvable anagrams (Experiment 2). According to Kanfer and Hagerman's (1981) self-regulation model, self-regulatory activities are evoked primarily in situations in which subjects are faced with repeated failure. Hence we predicted that individual differences in self-control would influence performance on the insolvable puzzles and not anagram performance after exposure to noncontingent failure. This prediction was confirmed: Only the performance of LR subjects on the insolvable puzzles was debilitated by the helplessness induction, whereas HR and LR subjects showed equal helplessness-induced deficits on the anagrams. The latter finding was interpreted in terms of the learned-helplessness model without the mediating effects of self-regulatory processes. As predicted from the self-control model, HR subjects more frequently checked statements indicating positive self-evaluations and task-oriented thoughts and less frequently checked negative self-evaluations than did LR subjects during exposure to uncontrollability in both experiments. We concluded that the self-control model accounts best for subjects' self-reactions during exposure to uncontrollability or failure, whereas the learned-helplessness model accounts for the generalization of helplessness from uncontrollable situations to controllable ones.

Environment↗
PubMed1992

Effects of fantasy contexts on children's learning and motivation: making learning more fun.

Two studies examined the effects of embedding instructional materials in relevant fantasy contexts on children's motivation and learning. In Study 1, Ss showed marked preferences for computer-based educational programs that involved fantasy elements. In Study 2, Ss worked with these programs for 5 hr. One program presented purely abstract problems. Others presented identical problems within fantasy contexts. Some Ss chose among 3 fantasies; others were assigned identical fantasies. Tests on the material occurred before, immediately after, and 2 weeks after the experimental sessions. Ss showed significantly greater learning and transfer in the fantasy than in the no-fantasy conditions. Having a choice of fantasies made no difference. Motivational and individualization strategies for enhancing interest and promoting learning are discussed.

Achievement↗
PubMed1975

Conditioned and latent inhibition in taste-aversion learning: clarifying the role of learned safety.

Experiments 1-3 investigated the applicability of the classical conditioning concept of conditioned inhibition to taste-aversion learning. Rats made ill after drinking saccharin and subsequently administered a "safe" exposure to saline (or casein hydrolysate) evidenced an enhanced preference for the safe fluid (relative to either a third, slightly aversive, solution or to water) when compared to controls in which saccharin was not previously poisoned. Such active condition inhibition was significantly reduced in Experiment 4 when two safe exposures to saline preceded saccharin-illness pairings. These results indicate that conditioned inhibition can be established in a taste-aversion procedure and that a latent inhibition manipulation reduces the ability of a taste to become a signal for safety. Implications of these findings for the learned safety theory of taste-aversion learning and the relevance to bait-shyness of principles established within the classical conditioning paradigm are considered.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Is tube-escape learning by protozoa associative learning?

The ciliate protozoa, Stentor and Paramecium, have been reported to escape from the bottom end of narrow capillary tubes into a larger volume of medium with increasing rapidity over the course of trials. This change in behavior has been considered an apparent example of associative learning. This decrease in escape time is not due to a change in the protozoa's environment, their swimming speed, frequency of ciliary reversals, or the proportion of time spent forward or backward swimming. Instead, most of the decrease results from a decrease in the proportion of time spent in upward swimming. However, a similar decrease in upward swimming occurs when the task is altered to require escape from the upper end of the capillary tubes. Because the protozoa exhibit the same change in behavior regardless of the reinforcing stimulus, tube-escape learning is not associative learning.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Delayed feedback disrupts the procedural-learning system but not the hypothesis-testing system in perceptual category learning.

W. T. Maddox, F. G. Ashby, and C. J. Bohil (2003) found that delayed feedback adversely affects information-integration but not rule-based category learning in support of a multiple-systems approach to category learning. However, differences in the number of stimulus dimensions relevant to solving the task and perceptual similarity failed to rule out 2 single-system interpretations. The authors conducted an experiment that remedied these problems and replicated W. T. Maddox et al.'s findings. The experiment revealed a strong performance decrement for information-integration but not rule-based category learning under delayed feedback that was due to an increase in the number of observers using hypothesis-testing strategies to solve the information-integration task, and lower accuracy rates for the few observers using information-integration strategies.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2005

Word learning and individual differences in word learning reflected in event-related potentials.

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms after onset of the 1st word. These results may point to an episodic memory effect. The 2nd word produced an N400 that distinguished trained and familiar word pairs that were related in meaning from unrelated word pairs. Skilled comprehenders learned more words than less skilled comprehenders and showed a stronger episodic memory effect at 400-600 ms on the 1st word and a stronger N400 effect on the 2nd word. These results suggest that superior word learning among skilled comprehenders may arise from a stronger episodic trace that includes orthographic and meaning information and illustrate, how an episodic theory of word identification can explain reading skill.

Evoked Potentials↗
PubMed1998

'The buck stops here': accepting responsibility for learning and actions after graduation from a problem-based learning nursing education curriculum.

Despite the increased attention that problem-based learning has received as an appropriate pedagogical technique for educating adults for professional practice, reports that evaluate the process are rare and usually relate to professions other than nursing. A study was undertaken in order to discover the graduates' own perceptions of a problem-based learning programme and its effectiveness in preparing them for the reality of their chosen profession. Twelve practising graduate nurses who had completed the programme were interviewed according to the ethnographic method. Three categories were identified from the data: 'and all of a sudden...', which describes the transition from PBL student to staff nurse; 'not an unthinking assistant', where the characteristics that the PBL graduates believe make them different from traditionally trained nurses are described; and 'the buck stops here', which describes the sense of personal responsibility that the graduates experience in terms of their learning and actions.

Anecdotes as Topic↗
PubMed2000

A comparison of learning outcomes and attitudes in student- versus faculty-led problem-based learning: an experimental study.

OBJECTIVES: To compare learning outcomes and perceptions of facilitator behaviours and small-group process in problem-based learning (PBL) groups led by students and those led by faculty. DESIGN: A prospective, Latin-square cross-over design was employed. Second-year medical students participated in 11 PBL cases over the course of the academic year. For each case, half the student groups were led by faculty and the other half by a student group member selected randomly to serve in the facilitator role. Learning outcomes were assessed by performance on objective examinations covering factual materials pertinent to the case. Perceptions of facilitator behaviours and of group functioning were assessed with a questionnaire completed at the end of each individual case. Focus-group discussions were held to gain more in-depth information about student perceptions and experience. Student-led sessions were observed at random by the investigators. SETTING: A state-supported, US medical school with a hybrid lecture-based and problem-based curriculum. SUBJECTS: One hundred and twenty-seven second-year medical students and 30 basic science and clinical faculty. RESULTS: No differences were detected in student performance on the objective evaluation based on whether the facilitator was a faculty member or peer group member, nor were there any differences in the perceptions of group process. Students gave peer facilitators slightly higher ratings in the second semester of the experiment. In the focus-group discussions, students voiced a general preference for student-led groups because they felt they were more efficient. Observation and focus-group reports suggest that groups led by students sometimes took short cuts in the PBL process. CONCLUSION: In a hybrid lecture- and PBL-based curriculum, student performance on objective examinations covering PBL materials is unaffected by the status of the facilitator (student vs. faculty). However, in peer-facilitated groups, students sometimes took short cuts in the PBL process that may undermine some of the intended goals of PBL.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2000

Practice-based learning: views on the development of a reflective learning tool.

CONTEXT: This study reports the first part of a funded project to develop a tool to improve and record learning, known as a Progress File. A Progress File typically contains an element of reflection and a means of recording achievement. AIM: The aim of the study was to collect and understand the attitudes and experiences of students and tutors with regard to reflection, and to determine their views on the development and implementation of a Progress File for one member of the dental team, the dental therapist. METHOD: A consultation exercise was undertaken in four institutions which train dental therapists. A total of 76 students and tutors were interviewed individually or in groups. Examples of reflective tools were used to prompt discussion and feedback. Emergent themes were derived from content analysis. RESULTS: Participants identified many uses for the Progress File within and beyond their courses. They also expressed concerns regarding the effectiveness and feasibility of Progress File learning within present educational environments. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Successful integration of the Progress File into courses of medical and dental education may depend upon institutional culture change and a move towards a system which facilitates and rewards reflection on learning. The results will inform development of the File.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2001

Connecticut Pictorial Learning Test: a pictorial version of the California Verbal Learning Test.

This paper describes the development of a pictorial version of the California Verbal Learning Test. The new instrument, named the Connecticut Pictorial Learning Test (COPLT), was tested in two experiments. The first experiment involved selection and testing of new verbal stimuli to be adapted for pictorial use. Results suggest that these new items are approximately equivalent in difficulty to the original CVLT stimuli. These stimuli can serve as CVLT alternate Form III for use in clinical verbal memory research. Recall means and standard deviations are provided for the new stimulus set with a young adult sample. The second experiment explores the psychometric properties of the new COPLT after stimuli were translated into pictorial form. The psychometric evidence suggests that the pictorial test has good internal consistency and concurrent validity with widely-used clinical memory tests. Furthermore, verbally-mediated information processing serves successful pictorial learning and subsequent recall performance in normal healthy control subjects when verbally-encodable pictorial stimuli are used. The use of semantic organization appears to be even more important for optimal performance using pictorial stimuli than with verbal stimuli. Scoring rules for the COPLT are included in the Appendix.

Adolescent↗