Charles Locurto

Professor Emeritus

Areas of Expertise

Animal behavior Comparative intelligence Individual differences in animal problem solving Behavioral genetics

Education

Ph.D., Fordham University

Biography

Charles Locurto's laboratory has been involved in several types of work. In the first, they study the nature of individual differences in mice across a number of learning and memory tasks. Locurto's work in this area is represented by these articles:

  • Locurto, C. & Scanlon, C. (1998). Individual differences and a spatial learning factor in two strains of mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112, 344-352. PDF
  • Locurto, C., Fortin, E., & Sullivan, R. (2003).The structure of individual differences in heterogeneous strain mice across problem types and motivational conditions. Genes, Brain, & Behavior, 2, 1-16. PDF
  • Locurto, Charles; Benoit, Andrea; Crowley, Caitlin; Miele, Andrea (2006).The Structure of Individual Differences in Batteries of Rapid Acquisition Tasks in Mice. Journal of Comparative Psychology. 120, 378-388. PDF
  • Locurto, C. (2007).Individual differences and animal personality. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2, 67-78. PDF
  • Carere, C. & Locurto, C. (2011). Interaction between animal personality and animal cognition. Current Zoology, 57, 491-498.

As an outgrowth of our work with mice, Locurto's team also came across an interesting phenomenon in which mice shift their preference for where they choose to escape from aversive stimulation on a trial by trial basis. Our work on this topic is given below:

  • Locurto, C. Emidy, C., & Hannan, S. (2002).Mice (Mus musculus) learn a win-shift but not a win-stay contingency underwater escape motivation. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 116, 308-312. PDF
  • Locurto, C. (2005). Further evidence that mice learn a win-shift but not a win-stay contingency underwater escape motivation. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119, 387-393. PDF

Locurto and his team's current area of interest is implicit learning. In humans, this type of learning refers to learning that occurs in the absence of awareness. In a nonhuman, implicit learning may be defined as learning that occurs in the absence of explicit contingencies of reinforcement to learn. The following articles, using cotton-top tamarins, illustrates this work:

  • Locurto, C., Gagne, M., & Levesque, K. (2009). Implicit chaining in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 116-122. PDF
  • Locurto, C., Gagne, M., & Nutile, L. (2010). Characteristics of implicit chaining in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Animal Cognition, 13, 617-629.