Word: pavlovic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Indeed, a lot of what researchers have learned about the biology of anxiety comes from scaring rats and then cutting them open. Just as the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed 100 years ago that you could condition a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, scientists today have taught rats to fear all kinds of things--from buzzers to lights--by giving them electrical shocks when they hear the buzzer or see the light. The animals quickly learn to fear the stimulus even in the absence of a shock. Then researchers destroy small portions of the rats' brains...
...front seat, wearing a scruffy, dark sweater, glancing in the rearview mirror. As you give directions and he begins to weave through traffic, a conversation soon evolves. You talk politics, discuss the weather, or tell him a bit about your classwork. The exchange is natural and familiar. Pavlov would have had a field day with this...
These are just some of the major divisions. Within the category of implicit (a.k.a. nondeclarative) memory, for example, lie the subcategories of associative memory--the phenomenon that famously led Pavlov's dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell, which they had learned to associate with food--and of habituation, in which we unconsciously file away unchanging features of the environment so we can pay closer attention to what's new and different upon encountering a new experience...
...mice were given a paw shock while in a box; after a few rounds, they showed signs of fear from just being in the box, having learned that a shock was likely to follow. They learned in similar fashion to be afraid when a bell sounded--a variation on Pavlov's dog experiments. In each case, the Doogies learned faster than normal mice. The same happened with a novel-object test: after becoming familiar with two plastic toys, the Doogies would show special interest when one was replaced; normal mice tended to be equally curious about a familiar object...
...there was only indirect evidence of communal hunting in Paleolithic times until archaeologist Olga Soffer came across the kind of clue that, a gender traditionalist might say, it took a womanly eye to notice. While sifting through clay fragments from the Paleolithic site of Pavlov in what is now the Czech Republic, she found a series of parallel lines impressed on some of the clay surfaces--evidence of woven fibers from about 25,000 years ago. Intrigued to find signs of weaving from this early date, Soffer and her colleagues examined 8,400 more clay fragments from the same...