The depressive-realism effect refers to a phenomenon in which depressed individuals are more realistic at assessing the relationship between two events than non-depressed individuals. Recent evidence suggests that the depressive realism hypothesis is weaker than first thought. Thus, we sought evidence for depressive-realism under conditions that we hypothesised would maximise the effect. We tested a clinically depressed sample of participants who were administered a rumination induction. Twenty-eight clinically depressed and 39 non-depressed participants were randomly allocated to either a rumination condition (focused on the causes, consequences, and meaning of their mood) or a distraction condition (focused on external objects/events such as a classroom). Participants then completed a contingency task in which there was no relationship between their responses and an outcome, and they were asked to make a judgment of how much control they had over an outcome. Both groups and conditions did not differ in their judgments of control; participants in all conditions showed a non-normative judgment of control. The depressive-realism effect was not observed in this study, even when depressed participants were encouraged to ruminate. Rather, the present study clearly demonstrates the robustness of the illusion of control.

This article argues that mirror neurons originate in sensorimotor associative learning and therefore a new approach is needed to investigate their functions. Mirror neurons were discovered about 20 years ago in the monkey brain, and there is now evidence that they are also present in the human brain. The intriguing feature of many mirror neurons is that they fire not only when the animal is performing an action, such as grasping an object using a power grip, but also when the animal passively observes a similar action performed by another agent. It is widely believed that mirror neurons are a genetic adaptation for action understanding; that they were designed by evolution to fulfill a specific socio-cognitive function. In contrast, we argue that mirror neurons are forged by domain-general processes of associative learning in the course of individual development, and, although they may have psychological functions, they do not necessarily have a specific evolutionary purpose or adaptive function. The evidence supporting this view shows that (1) mirror neurons do not consistently encode action “goals”; (2) the contingency- and context-sensitive nature of associative learning explains the full range of mirror neuron properties; (3) human infants receive enough sensorimotor experience to support associative learning of mirror neurons (“wealth of the stimulus”); and (4) mirror neurons can be changed in radical ways by sensorimotor training. The associative account implies that reliable information about the function of mirror neurons can be obtained only by research based on developmental history, system-level theory, and careful experimentation.

Almost 40 years ago I began what turned out to be a programme of research on the way in which experience can change the effectiveness of the events used as stimuli in standard associative learning procedures. In this personal history I will describe my early (failed) attempts to find evidence for the acquired distinctiveness of cues, and my conclusion that experience tends to reduce, not enhance the associability of stimuli. I then go on to describe my attempts to square this conclusion with the stubborn empirical fact that, in some circumstances, pretraining with (or preexposure to) stimuli, can facilitate subsequent discrimination between them. I describe experiments (conducted mostly with rats as the subjects) showing how some of these effects can be explained in associative terms. Others, however, seemed to demand an explanation in terms of a new learning process that modulates the effective salience of stimuli. I go on to describe attempts to specify the nature of this process, and (bringing the story up to date) to describe recent experiments investigating the effects of salience modulation in human perceptual learning.

Pavlov's contribution to experimental psychology was to invent a technique that allowed him to undertake a prolonged and systematic series of well-controlled experiments that, astonishingly enough, uncovered many if not most of the phenomena of what is rightly called Pavlovian conditioning. It was not for another 30 years or more that English-speaking psychologists began to match that achievement. Of course there have been new developments and discoveries since his time. Two examples are discussed: the important role of variable associability or attention even in simple conditioning, and the rigorous application of associative learning theory to the behavior of adult humans.

Evaluative conditioning is best defined as an effect, that is, as a change in the valence of a stimulus that results from pairing the stimulus with another stimulus. This definition has several advantages that are made explicit in this paper. One of the advantages is that it clarifies that evaluative conditioning can be due to multiple processes. Therefore, the conditions under which evaluative conditioning is observed can depend on the processes that underlie a particular manifestation of evaluative conditioning. This could explain why there are so many conflicting results about the conditions under which evaluative conditioning can be found. Future research should adopt a meta-conditional approach that focuses not only on whether a certain condition is crucial for obtaining evaluative conditioning but should also examine when a certain condition is crucial.

The possibility that facial expressions of emotion change the affective valence of faces through associative learning was explored using facial electromyography (EMG). In Experiment 1, EMG activity was registered while the participants (N = 57) viewed sequences of neutral faces (Stimulus 1 or S1) changing to either a happy or an angry expression (Stimulus 2 or S2). As a consequence of learning, participants who showed patterning of facial responses in the presence of angry and happy faces, that is, higher Corrugator Supercilii (CS) activity in the presence of angry faces and higher Zygomaticus Major (ZM) activity in the presence of happy faces, showed also a similar pattern when viewing the corresponding S1 faces. Explicit evaluations made by an independent sample of participants (Experiment 2) showed that evaluation of S1 faces was changed according to the emotional expression with which they had been associated. These results are consistent with an interpretation of rapid facial reactions to faces as affective responses that reflect the valence of the stimulus and that are sensitive to learned changes in the affective meaning of faces.

Subject-performed tasks (SPTs) may facilitate the deficit in associative learning among individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) by inducing episodic integration of object-action associations. To test this hypothesis, we examined free recall and recognition memory following enactment and verbal encoding in healthy elderly controls and individuals with aMCI. Study lists contained either semantically integrated (“Bounce the ball”) or crossed object-action commands, in which episodic and semantic associations were placed in opposition (“Pet the compass”). Associative learning was indeed better after SPT than verbal encoding and with integrated relative to crossed lists for the aMCI group, as it was for controls. Moreover, the degree to which SPTs reduced the semantic interference inherent in the crossed conditions was equivalent for the two groups. The results showed that enactment facilitates formation of episodic associations, even when not supported by preexisting semantic knowledge, and even among individuals who have particular difficulty forming new associations (JINS, 2006, 12, 493–501.)

We propose that the isomorphism generally observed between the representations composing our momentary phenomenal experience and the structure of the world is the end-product of a progressive organization that emerges thanks to elementary associative processes that take our conscious representations themselves as the stuff on which they operate, a thesis that we summarize in the concept of Self-Organizing Consciousness (SOC).

If the cortex is an associative memory, strongly connected cell assemblies will form when neurons in different cortical areas are frequently active at the same time. The cortical distributions of these assemblies must be a consequence of where in the cortex correlated neuronal activity occurred during learning. An assembly can be considered a functional unit exhibiting activity states such as full activation (“ignition”) after appropriate sensory stimulation (possibly related to perception) and continuous reverberation of excitation within the assembly (a putative memory process). This has implications for cortical topographies and activity dynamics of cell assemblies forming during language acquisition, in particular for those representing words. Cortical topographies of assemblies should be related to aspects of the meaning of the words they represent, and physiological signs of cell assembly ignition should be followed by possible indicators of reverberation. The following postulates are discussed in detail: (1) assemblies representing phonological word forms are strongly lateralized and distributed over perisylvian cortices; (2) assemblies representing highly abstract words such as grammatical function words are also strongly lateralized and restricted to these perisylvian regions; (3) assemblies representing concrete content words include additional neurons in both hemispheres; (4) assemblies representing words referring to visual stimuli include neurons in visual cortices; and (5) assemblies representing words referring to actions include neurons in motor cortices. Two main sources of evidence are used to evaluate these proposals: (a) imaging studies focusing on localizing word processing in the brain, based on stimulus-triggered event-related potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and (b) studies of the temporal dynamics of fast activity changes in the brain, as revealed by high-frequency responses recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG). These data provide evidence for processing differences between words and matched meaningless pseudowords, and between word classes, such as concrete content and abstract function words, and words evoking visual or motor associations. There is evidence for early word class-specific spreading of neuronal activity and for equally specific high-frequency responses occurring later. These results support a neurobiological model of language in the Hebbian tradition. Competing large-scale neuronal theories of language are discussed in light of the data summarized. Neurobiological perspectives on the problem of serial order of words in syntactic strings are considered in closing.

Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives.