“Economic Crisis and Poaching: Advice on Anti-Poaching Management from The Galician Shellfish Sector”

ABSTRACT

The aim of this work is to prove the significant relationship between the economic crisis and the increase of the shellfish poaching in Galicia (NW Spain) during the period 2008–2012. A relationship was observed between the “necessity” causes and the economic incentives as an explanation for shellfish poaching. The results achieved pointing out the importance to complete the coercive dissuasive methods in the fight against poaching using informal management mechanisms implemented in Galician shellfish communities, especially in co-managed contexts in which unemployment and necessity processes are identified.     

Classical conditioning and pain: Conditioned analgesia and hyperalgesia

This article reviews situations in which stimuli produce an increase or a decrease in nociceptive responses through basic associative processes and provides an associative account of such changes. Specifically, the literature suggests that cues associated with stress can produce conditioned analgesia or conditioned hyperalgesia, depending on the properties of the conditioned stimulus (e.g., contextual cues and audiovisual cues vs. gustatory and olfactory cues, respectively) and the proprieties of the unconditioned stimulus (e.g., appetitive, aversive, or analgesic, respectively). When such cues are associated with reducers of exogenous pain (e.g., opiates), they typically increase sensitivity to pain. Overall, the evidence concerning conditioned stress-induced analgesia, conditioned hyperalagesia, conditioned tolerance to morphine, and conditioned reduction of morphine analgesia suggests that selective associations between stimuli underlie changes in pain sensitivity.     

Encoding of geometric and featural spatial information by goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Goldfish (Carassius auratus) were trained in different place-finding tasks as a means of analyzing their ability to encode the geometric and the featural properties of the environment. Results showed that goldfish could encode and use both geometric and featural information to navigate. Goldfish trained in a maplike, or relational, procedure encoded both types of information in a single representation. In contrast, fish trained in a directly cued procedure developed 2 independent and competing strategies. These results suggest that the geometric properties of the spatial arrangement and discrete landmarks are sensitive to encoding in a maplike or relational system, whereas different sources of spatial information are encoded in a single and flexible representation of the environment.     

Stimulus Control with Computer Assisted Learning

Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) has been shown to be an efficient learning-teaching procedure. Although there is an extensive educational software tradition using CAL approaches, few of them have demonstrated a better student performance than standard drill and practice methods. The purpose of this study was (a) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Let's Play With... software program, and (b) to evaluate the effectiveness of a prompt (i.e. a blinking object) used in the program. The educational software Let's Play With... was designed to teach basic concepts involving shapes and body positions to preschool students. The software structure follows a behavioral design and uses a stimulus control procedure. The study was carried out with 64 preschool students in the Cadiz (Spain) School District. Statistically significant differences were found between the experimental group and a control group.     

A comparator view of Pavlovian and differential inhibition

In 3 experiments using rats as subjects, the authors varied trial spacing to investigate the conditions under which Pavlovian and differential inhibition are observed. Experiment 1 compared Pavlovian and differential inhibition with spaced training trials. Spaced trials resulted in only the Pavlovian inhibitor passing both summation and retardation tests. Conversely, Experiment 2 compared these 2 types of inhibition with massed training trials. This training resulted in only the differential inhibitor passing both tests for conditioned inhibition. Finally, in Experiment 3 all subjects experienced Pavlovian inhibition training with massed trials. Although this training by itself did not result in behavior indicative of inhibition, subjects that also experienced posttraining extinction of the training context did pass both tests for inhibition. Overall, these results are anticipated by the extended comparator hypothesis (Denniston, Savastano, & Miller, 2001) but are problematic for most contemporary associative learning theories.     

Latent inhibition in human affective learning

This study presents the results of a new visual procedure designed to generate affective learning, namely the change in the affective rating of a previously neutral stimulus by simply pairing it with a liked or disliked stimulus. Specifically, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of nonreinforced preexposures to the to-be-conditioned stimulus (a non-sense shape) on affective conditioning. This manipulation, intended to produce latent inhibition, typically results in retarded learning when the preexposed stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The results revealed that it is possible to modify the affective value of a previously neutral non-sense shape by pairing it with a liked or disliked unconditioned stimulus, and that latent inhibition affects affective conditioning.