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Beyond belongingness: Rethinking innate behavioral predispositions, learning constraints, and cognitive capacities

2022 , Sosa, Rodrigo

Learning is a major determinant of behavioral change for some organisms through their lifecycles. From an associative perspective, learning is assumed to occur whenever organisms experience particular statistical regularities in their environment; specifically, meaningful outcomes that follow certain cues or actions chiefly contribute to behavioral change. However, numerous empirical reports reveal that not all cue–outcome and action–outcome combinations are learned equally well, a phenomenon that is termed belongingness. Those reports are valuable as descriptive-level knowledge, but beg further considerations, like what is the origin, adaptive value of, and underlying mechanisms associated with the predisposition to couple particular events. Contrary to what is often assumed, the mere observation of learning predispositions says little as to whether they arise from genetics, are constrained by hardwired neural circuitries, or have been ecologically advantageous in an evolutionary timescale. The present paper aims to present a number of notions from different research fields outside the hard core of associative learning and, in so doing, provides elements for careful study and conceptualization of this issue. Thereafter, these notions are pooled to understand behavioral variation in a wide array of phenomena, thus, bringing a more informed approach to the nature versus nurture debate.

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Conditioned inhibition, inhibitory learning, response inhibition, and inhibitory control: Outlining a conceptual clarification.

2022 , Sosa, Rodrigo

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The Role of the Lateral Habenula in Inhibitory Learning from Reward Omission

2021 , Sosa, Rodrigo , Jesús Mata-Luévanos , Mario Buenrostro-Jáuregui

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The nervous system as a solution for implementing closed negative feedback control loops

2022 , Sosa, Rodrigo , Emmanuel Alcalá