Benjamin M Seitz

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychology

Like all biological systems, human memory is likely to have been influenced by evolutionary processes, and its abilities have been subjected to selective mechanisms. Consequently, human memory should be primed to better remember information relevant to one’s evolutionary fitness. Supporting this view, participants asked to rate words based on their...

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine...

How well do we remember eating food? Some nutritional scientists have decried memory of eating as being highly unreliable (i.e. low in accuracy), but it is unclear if memory of eating is particularly worse than memory of other behaviors. In fact, evolutionary reasoning suggests the mammalian memory system might be biased towards enhanced memory of...

The study of memory is commonly associated with neuroscience, aging, education, and eyewitness testimony. Here we discuss how eating behavior is also heavily intertwined-and yet considerably understudied in its relation to memory processes. Both are influenced by similar neuroendocrine signals (e.g., leptin and ghrelin) and are dependent on hippoca...

For over two decades, midbrain dopamine was considered synonymous with the prediction error in temporal-difference reinforcement learning. Central to this proposal is the notion that reward-predictive stimuli become endowed with the scalar value of predicted rewards. When these cues are subsequently encountered, their predictive value is compared t...

Behavioral flexibility, adapting behavior to changing situations, is hypothesized to be related to adapting to new environments and geographic range expansions. However, flexibility is rarely directly tested in a way that allows insight into how flexibility works. Research on great-tailed grackles, a bird species that has rapidly expanded their ran...

Research into animal cognitive abilities is increasing quickly and often uses methods where behavioral performance on a task is assumed to represent variation in the underlying cognitive trait. However, because these methods rely on behavioral responses as a proxy for cognitive ability, it is important to validate that the task structure does, in f...

Psychologists use experiments to understand causal relationships. The effects that we observe are typically shown in subsets of people using specific stimuli, yet we assume these specific effects can generalize to many different populations and circumstances than specifically tested. Here, we provide a clear demonstration of how the set of stimuli...

For over two decades, phasic activity in midbrain dopamine neurons was considered synonymous with the prediction error in temporal-difference reinforcement learning.[1], [2], [3], [4] Central to this proposal is the notion that reward-predictive stimuli become endowed with the scalar value of predicted rewards. When these cues are subsequently enco...

Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms is an exploration of laboratory and field research on the many ways that evolution has influenced learning and memory processes, such as associative learning, social learning, and spatial, working, and episodic memory systems. This volume features research by both outstanding early-career scientists as we...

Behavioral flexibility should, theoretically, be positively related to behavioral inhibition because one should need to inhibit a previously learned behavior to change their behavior when the task changes (flexibility). However, several investigations show no or mixed support of this hypothesis, which challenges the assumption that inhibition is in...

Behavioral flexibility, the ability to adapt behavior to new circumstances, is thought to play an important role in a species’ ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. However, flexibility is rarely directly tested in species in a way that would allow us to determine how flexibility works to predict a speci...

Behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change based on learning from previous experience, is thought to play an important role in a species ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. It is alternatively or additionally possible that causal cognition, the ability to understan...

The acquisition of instrumental responding can be supported by primary reinforcers or by conditional (also known as secondary) reinforcers that themselves have an association to a primary reinforcer. While primary reinforcement has been heavily studied for the past century, the associative basis of conditioned reinforcement has received comparative...

Higher-order conditioning involves learning causal links between multiple events, which then allows one to make novel inferences. For example, observing a correlation between two events (e.g., a neighbor wearing a particular sports jersey), later helps one make new predictions based on this knowledge (e.g., the neighbor’s wife’s favorite sports tea...

Operant chambers are small enclosures used to test animal behavior and cognition. While traditionally reliant on simple technologies for presenting stimuli (e.g., lights and sounds) and recording responses made to basic manipulanda (e.g., levers and buttons), an increasing number of researchers are beginning to use Touchscreen-equipped Operant Cham...

Behavioral flexibility should theoretically be positively related to behavioral inhibition (hereafter referred to as inhibition) because one should need to inhibit a previously learned behavior to change their behavior when the task changes (the flexibility component;). However, several investigations show no or mixed support of this hypothesis, wh...

Behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change based on learning from previous experience, is thought to play an important role in a species’ ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. However, it is possible that causal cognition, the ability to understand relationships beyo...

Operant chambers are small enclosures used to test animal behavior and cognition. While traditionally reliant on simple technologies for presenting stimuli (e.g., lights and sounds) and recording responses made to basic manipulanda (e.g., levers and buttons), an increasing number of researchers are beginning to use Touchscreen-equipped Operant Cham...

The study of memory is commonly associated with neuroscience, aging, education, and eyewitness testimony. Here we discuss how eating behavior is also heavily intertwined—and yet considerably understudied in its relation to memory processes. Both are influenced by similar neuroendocrine signals (e.g., leptin and ghrelin) and are dependent on hippoca...

The adaptive memory framework posits that human memory is an evolved cognitive feature, in which stimuli relevant to fitness are better remembered than neutral stimuli. There is now substantial evidence that processing a neutral stimulus in terms of its relevancy to an imagined ancestral survival scenario enhances recall, although there is still di...

It is unclear if, and to what extent, the human memory system is biased towards food and food relevant stimuli. Drawing upon existing demonstrations of attentional biases to high calorie food images, and findings that evolutionarily relevant stimuli are preferentially remembered, we hypothesized that images of high calorie foods would be better rem...

Beginning with Pavlov (1927), there has been great interest in how associative learning processes affect eating behavior. For instance, flavors can become preferred when paired with calories or, conversely, become aversive when paired with illness. This relationship between flavors and caloric or toxic outcomes has been investigated by a number of...

Thorndike’s Law of Effect provides a framework for understanding the selection of behaviors given specific environmental reward contingencies. Though a highly influential model, especially given its resurgence in popularity to understand habitual behaviors, it fails to predict several well-documented behavioral phenomena and incorrectly views extin...

The adaptive memory framework posits that the human memory system is an evolved cognitivefeature, in which stimuli relevant to fitness are better remembered than neutral stimuli. There is now substantial evidence that processing a neutral stimulus in terms of its relevancy to an imagined ancestral survival scenario produces enhances recall, althoug...

Are all memories created equal, or are we biased to remember information most relevant to our evolutionary fitness? This question is underexplored in dominant models of memory that often treat all incoming information with equal potential to be remembered. We hypothesized that memory is systematically biased towards remembering fitness-relevant beh...

Deeply rooted within the history of experimental psychology is the search for general laws of learning that hold across tasks and species. Central to this enterprise has been the notion of equipotentiality; that any two events have the same likelihood of being associated with one another as any other pair of events. Much work, generally summarized...