When you are trying to teach a new skill, whether it's teaching your dog to sit or getting yourself to stop doomscrolling before bed, rewarding good behavior is often better than punishing mistakes.

Eunice Framm, senior keeper of barnyard animals at the Cincinnati Zoo, has taught pigs to bowl, goats to paint, and red pandas to receive vaccines. She, and all other keepers, do so through the zoo’s ...

A long-standing debate in neuroscience is whether classical and operant conditioning are mechanistically similar or distinct. The feeding behavior of Aplysia provides a model system suitable for ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American While second nature to many of us, driving a ...