ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, Richard F. Thompson's ebullience for his new discovery involving the role of the cerebellum in associative learning was contagious. Those of us who interacted with him at this time got caught up in the prospect of mapping the neural circuitry for a basic form of learning and memory, classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane (NM)/eyeblink response. He was also convinced that the time had come to test the rabbit model system in what he called “applications” such as normal aging. With much of the circuitry being known, and with the demonstrated age-related impairment on acquisition of conditioned responses (CRs), it seemed likely that the neural basis of behavioral aging might be elucidated with this model.
