An obesogenic refined low-fat diet disrupts attentional and behavioral control processes in a vigilance task in rats.

Diets consisting of refined foods (REF) are associated with poor physical (e.g., obesity and diabetes) and mental (e.

Imagine that! Cue-evoked representations guide rat behavior during ambiguous situations.

Mental imagery involves the perceptual-like experience of an event that is not physically present, or detected by the senses. Fast and Blaisdell (2011) reported that rats use the representation of an associatively retrieved event to guide behavior in ambiguous situations. Rats were reinforced for lever-pressing during 1 of 2 lights but not both lights.

The redistribution of Drosophila vesicular monoamine transporter mutants from synaptic vesicles to large dense-core vesicles impairs amine-dependent behaviors.

Monoamine neurotransmitters are stored in both synaptic vesicles (SVs), which are required for release at the synapse, and large dense-core vesicles (LDCVs), which mediate extrasynaptic release. The contributions of each type of vesicular release to specific behaviors are not known. To address this issue, we generated mutations in the C-terminal trafficking domain of the Drosophila vesicular monoamine transporter (DVMAT), which is required for the vesicular storage of monoamines in both SVs and LDCVs.

Food choice in the laboratory pigeon.

Although food reward plays a large role in learning and behavioral experiments, there have been few studies examining the most motivating food reward for pigeons. Brown (1969) found that pigeons had a tendency to prefer peas, while Killeen et al. (1993) found pigeons to prefer peas and popcorn in Experiment 1A.