Learning and animal models

Learning is a quite long-term change occurring in behaviors by an individual’s experiences. In fact learning process is for not only human beings but also all organisms. That is why animal experiments and animal models are used to investigate learning process. There are behavioral, affective, cognitive and neurophysiological learning rules, which were put forward for learning. Behavioral theoreticians admit that learning improves establishing a connection between stimulus and behavior and changing behaviors via reinforcement is essential. According to cognitive hypothesis, learning is attributing a meaning to whatever takes place around an individual. Affective concepts concern problems about learning rather than nature of it. Neurophysiological education principles emphasize that the brain is a parallel processor and learning should be evaluated as a psychological event. Experimental animal studies help us understand the physiological and psychological conditions of several diseases. Studies concerning learning and memory play a great role in explaining cognitive processes of neuropsychiatric diseases. When we have a look at the literature, experimental animal models about learning were described. These are Morris water maze, T maze or radial arm maze, novel object recognition, fear conditioning, 5-choice serial reaction time task, active avoidance and passive avoidance. In this course, ‘learning and animal models’ will be presented.