Publications by authors named "Karissa Payne"

Actively avoiding danger is necessary for survival. Most research on active avoidance has focused on the behavioral and neurobiological processes when individuals learn to avoid alone, within a solitary context. Therefore, little is known about how social context affects active avoidance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Active avoidance is essential for survival, but most studies have focused on how individuals act alone, leaving gaps in understanding the influence of social context on this behavior.
  • In experiments with rats, it was found that those trained with a social partner showed more freezing behavior and less active avoidance compared to those trained alone, with notable gender differences in responses under solitary conditions.
  • The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a key role in mediating avoidance responses, and manipulating this brain region affected avoidance differently in males and females, highlighting the need for further research on how these mechanisms differ by sex, especially in relation to anxiety disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although episodic memory declines with age, older adults are often able to make use of relevant knowledge to support episodic memory. More specifically, prior knowledge may support the perception of meaningful events through the process of event segmentation. We sought to test whether increasing older adults' knowledge for novel activities (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It is generally accepted that the geometry of an environment is a reliable source of information for spatial navigation used by most vertebrate species. However, there is a continuing debate on which geometrical properties of space are the ones that matter for reorientation. In this study, pigeons were trained to find a food reward hidden in 2 opposite corners in a rectangular arena.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF