They are likely implemented by specialized brain circuits, and indeed great progress has been made in localizing these operations to the accessory olfactory bulb ( Brennan and Keverne, 1997) and the cortical amygdala ( LeDoux, 2000).
These learning systems appear designed for special purposes, they perform very specific associations, and govern binary behavioral decisions.
Another form of rapid learning accessible to laboratory experiments is fear conditioning, where a formerly innocuous stimulus gets associated with a painful experience, leading to subsequent avoidance of the stimulus ( Fanselow and Bolles, 1979 Bourtchuladze et al., 1994). Here, the female mouse forms an olfactory memory of her mating partner that allows her to terminate the pregnancy if she encounters another male that threatens infanticide. In laboratory studies, one prominent instance of one-shot learning is the Bruce effect ( Bruce, 1959).
Clearly, such rapid acquisition of new associations or of new motor skills can confer enormous survival advantages. How can animals or machines acquire the ability for complex behaviors from one or a few experiences? Canonical examples include language learning in children, where new words are learned after just a few instances of their use, or learning to balance a bicycle, where humans progress from complete incompetence to near perfection after crashing once or a few times.
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