The Warsaw Colloquium on Instrumental Conditioning and Brain Research

The book contains the proceedings of The Warsaw Colloquium on Instrumental Conditioning and Brain Research held in Jablonna near Warsaw on May 1-5, 1979. The proceedings are also published in the sixth issue of 1979 and the first issue of 1980 of Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis. Three papers published later, in the fourth issue of 1980, are also included. The aim of this Symposium was to honour the memory of the great Polish neurophysiologist Jerzy Konorski and the sixtieth anniversary of the Nencki Institute, where Professor Konorski has created his school. Forty-five papers, prepared mainly by Konorski's pupils and scientific friends, cover several fields of current brain research. To each of them Professor Konorski contributed significantly. In fact, many presented papers have been strongly influenced by his scientific ideas. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the Symposium was its very international character due to numerous participants from both East and West. As such, the Symposium is a worthy symbol of the aehievements of both Jerzy Konorski himself and the Neneki Institute as a whole in the field of cooperation of scientists from East and West. Scientific sessions were held in the mornings and afternoons. In the evenings the participants mutually read and commented their papers. Moreover, colleagues from the USA and Great Britain eorrected the English of the manuscripts. In partieular Prof. J. F. Brennan, Prof.

Opening Address.- Opening Address.- Involvement of the partial reinforcement procedure in reward training: Opening Address.- Perceptual mechanisms.- An exploration of the ability of macaques to detect microstimulation of striate cortex.- Conditioned audio-visual targeting reflexes in split brain cats.- Search for structures involved in integration of letters in pairs.- Reversed postoptokinetic nystagmus: A model of plasticity in the vestibuloocular system.- Spatial memory and instrumental conditioning.- The orienting-exploratory response hypothesis of discriminative conditioning.- Auditory targeting reflexes: their determining role in directional instrumental responding.- Visual acuity functions and pattern discrimination in the destriate cat.- The pretrigeminal cat as an instrument for investigation of the ocular fixation reflex.- Motivational mechanisms.- Motivational role of social reinforcement in dog-man relations.- Exploratory motivation in response-to-change test in rats.- Factors of extinction of alimentary instrumental conditioned reflex.- External stimulus control of self-stimulation behavior.- The role of emotions in the formation of instrumental conditioned reflex.- Recent experiments testing an opponent-process theory of acquired motivation.- Brain mechanisms and hedonic processes.- Motor mechanisms.- Structures involved in acquisition and performance of visually guided movements in the cat.- The postural support of movement in cat and dog.- The monkey’s prefrontal cortex functions in motor programming.- Defensive conditioned reflexes.- Pharmacological evidence on the specialization of CNS mechanisms responsible for motor act inhibition by aversive events.- Prefrontal cortical effects on aversively motivated instrumental conditioning in rats: some ontogenic considerations.- Central mediation of hormonal influences on instrumental avoidance conditioning.- On the mechanism of the post-asymptotic CR decrement phenomenon.- Mathematical modelling of reaction latency: The structure of the models and its motivation.- Locus coeruleus lesions and avoidance behavior in rats.- Protection from extinction by a conditioned inhibitor.- Mechanisms of motivation in avoidance behavior.- Electrophysiological correlates of conditioning.- Cortical mechanisms of goal-directed motor acts in the Rhesus monkey.- Specific and unspecific neuronal mechanisms of cellular operant conditioning.- Two behavioral paradigms for study of rapid changes in functional grouping of neurons.- Neuronal mechanisms of conditioned placing reactions in cats.- Single unit activity in the visual cortex during conditioning in cats.- Pacing of behavioral and electroencephalographic events.- A study of synaptic plasticity in hippocampal slices.- Central excitation and inhibition in conditioned reflexes.- Microelectrode analysis of the cellular mechanisms of conditioned reflex in rabbits.- Subcortical mechanisms.- Participation of caudate nucleus in different forms of voluntary activity in cats.- Functions of the neostriatum: cortex-dependent or autonomous?.- The emotiogenic brain structures in conditioning mechanisms: conditioned evoked potentials and motor responses.- Relationships between phenomena of paradoxical sleep and their counterparts in wakefulness.- The role of striatum in the acquisition of instrumental defensive reactions in dogs.- Anatomical considerations.- Relationships of precentral, premotor and prefrontal cortex to the mediodorsal and intralaminar nuclei of the monkey thalamus.- Thalamoamygdaloid connections studied by the method of retrograde transport.- Authors’ Index.