Learning & Behavior最新文献

The waggle dance of honey bees is a classic example of complex behavior and communication in animals. Despite long being considered a completely fixed and innate behavior, recent work is showing a role for social learning in tuning components of the waggle dance in naïve bees.

Memory for what, where, and when an event took place has been interpreted as playing a critical role in episodic memory. Moreover, such memory is likely to be important to an animal's ability to efficiently forage for food. In Experiment 1 of the present study, pigeons were trained on a task in which on each trial, one lit stimulus color and location was presented and then another. A cue presented after the last stimulus location signaled that the pigeon was to choose either the first location presented, or the last location presented, to receive a reinforcer. After learning this task, in Experiment 2, the color cue was removed, requiring the pigeons to choose based on location and order alone. In Experiment 3, when a delay was inserted between presentation of the two locations, it had little effect on task accuracy. Results suggested that the pigeons had acquired the task using a single-code/default rule. When presented with the cue indicating that the last location was correct, pigeons selected the location just presented. When presented with the cue indicating that the first location was correct, pigeons chose the other location, by default. In support of this hypothesis, in Experiment 4, when a delay was inserted, prior to receiving the instructional cue, it had a disruptive effect on task accuracy proportional to the delay. Although the present results do not provide evidence for episodic memory, they do suggest that the pigeons have developed a single-code/default strategy that appears to be an efficient means of performing this task.

Previous studies have shown that whip spiders (Amblypygi) can use a variety of cues to navigate to and recognize a home refuge. The current study aimed to determine whether whip spiders were capable of using the boundary geometry of an experimental space (geometric information) to guide goal-directed navigation and to investigate any preferential use of geometric or feature (visual) information. Animals were first trained to find a goal location situated in one corner of a rectangular arena (geometric information) fronting a dark-green-colored wall, which created a brightness contrast with the other three white walls (feature information). Various probe trials were then implemented to determine cue use. It was found that animals were capable of directing their choice behavior towards geometrically correct corners at a rate significantly higher than chance, even when the feature cue was removed. By contrast, choice behavior dropped to random chance when geometric information was removed (test in a square arena) and only feature information remained. Choice behavior was also reduced to chance when geometric and feature information were set in conflict (by moving the feature cue to one of the longer walls in the rectangular arena). The data thus suggest that whip spiders are capable of using geometric information to guide goal-directed navigation and that geometric information is preferred over feature guidance, although a feature cue may set the context for activating geometry-guided navigation. Experimental design limitations and future directions are discussed.

Under certain conditions, multiple nonhuman species have been observed engaging in choice behavior that resulted in less food earned when compared to the amount of food that was available to be earned over the course of a session. This phenomenon is particularly strong in pigeons, but has also been observed in rats and nonhuman primates. Conversely, human participants have demonstrated a propensity to choose more optimally. However, human participants do not exclusively choose the alternative associated with more reinforcement. Framing a task in a real-world narrative has been effective in improving problem-solving on other tasks such as the Wason Four-Card problem. The present study gave human participants a choice task with either abstract stimuli or with a real-world narrative. In addition, participants were given terminal stimuli that were either predictive or unpredictive of reinforcement. Thus, participants were assigned to one of four conditions: Abstract Predictive, Abstract Unpredictive, Narrative Predictive, or Narrative Unpredictive. In contrast to the improved performance on the Wason Four-Card task, the current study found no evidence that the addition of a real-world narrative improved optimal choice performance. Rather, it may have interfered with optimal choice selection in that participants who received the narrative and unpredictive terminal stimuli were at chance performance at the end of the experimental session. Conversely, participants in the Abstract Unpredictive, Abstract Predictive, and Narrative Predictive conditions all demonstrated a preference for the optimal alternative. Possible mechanisms for these findings and future directions are discussed.

Sex differences have been found in allocentric spatial learning and memory tasks, with the literature indicating that males outperform females, although this issue is still controversial. This study aimed to explore the behavior of male and female rats during the habituation and learning of a spatial memory task performed in the Morris Water Maze (MWM). The study included a large sample of 89 males and 85 females. We found that females searched slightly faster than males during habituation with a visible platform. During learning, both male and female rats decreased the latency and distance traveled to find the hidden platform over the days, with males outperforming females in the distance traveled. Females swam faster but did not find the platform earlier, suggesting a less directed navigational strategy. Both sexes increased time spent in the target zone over the days, with no sex differences. Although females swam more in the periphery during the first days of the task, both sexes decreased the time spent in this area. Finally, only males increased swimming in the pool's center over the days, spending more time than females in this area across the entire training. In conclusion, we need to register several variables in the MWM and analyze path strategies to obtain more robust results concerning sex differences. Research on spatial learning should include both sexes to achieve a more equitable, representative, and translational science.

A new study shows that bumblebees learn socially, and this resulted in a novel behavior becoming dominant across a group. These findings highlight the opportunity going forward to use social insects to address how simple cognitive mechanisms can underpin the development of complex behavioral phenomena.

We recently showed that food-hoarding birds use familiarity processes more than recollection processes when remembering the spatial location of their caches (Smulders et al., Animal Cognition 26:1929-1943, 2023). Pravosudov (Learning & Behavior, https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-023-00616-x , 2023) called our findings into question, claiming that our method is unable to distinguish between recollection and familiarity, and that associative learning tasks are a better way to study the memory for cache sites. In this response, we argue that our methods would have been more likely to detect recollection than familiarity, if Pravosudov's assertions were correct. We also point out that associative learning mechanisms may be good for building semantic knowledge, but are incompatible with the needs of cache site memory, which requires the unique encoding of caching events.

To investigate the extent of adoption of more efficient coding strategies, pigeons learned, in three experiments, a symbolic matching-to-sample task that featured an asymmetric sample-comparison mapping. In all experiments, one comparison was correct following one of the samples (one-to-one mapping), and another comparison was correct following the remaining samples (many-to-one mapping). The experiments differed in sample number; Experiment 1 featured three samples, Experiment 2 five samples, and Experiment 3 seven samples. Our goal was to assess the adoption of a single-code/default coding strategy, which establishes two response rules: one rule specific to the sample mapped one-to-one (the single code), and another rule to be applied following any other sample (the default rule). Alternatively, the animals could establish more response rules, one per sample. Thus, the single-code/default strategy allows learning a task via a reduced number of response rules, and the more samples are mapped many-to-one, the greater the savings it allows. As such, the three experiments should progressively be more amenable to the adoption of this strategy. Overall, the adoption of a single-code/default strategy was not widespread. When taken together with previous results, the present study suggests that the amount of training may affect the coding strategy pigeons adopt. Additionally, our results underscore that individual differences are a fundamental aspect to consider when studying learning flexibility.

Anglada-Tort et al. Current Biology, 33, 1472-1486.e12, (2023) conducted a large-scale iterative learning study with cross-cultural human participants to understand how musical structure emerges. Together with archaeological, developmental, historical cross-cultural music data, and cross-species studies we can begin to elucidate the origins of music.

Three experiments are reported that used a new test of spatial memory in rats. The apparatus used was dual eight-arm radial mazes that were connected at one arm of each maze, with a start arm and doors to each maze. Rats could be forced to go to one maze or the other or could make a free choice between mazes. In Experiment 1, rats formed reference memory for the arm containing food on one maze but had food randomly placed on different arms over trials on the other maze. In Experiment 2, rats formed working memory for the arm containing food on one maze but not the other. In Experiment 3, food location changed randomly among trials on both mazes, but one maze contained a cue for the location of food. Rats used reference and working memory to go directly to the food arm on one maze but found food only after searching several arms on the other maze. Most importantly, when given free-choice trials rats developed a significant preference for the maze where they knew the location of food reward or found the cue indicating the location of reward. We suggest these findings may be best interpreted by rats applying two successive rules: (1) choose the maze that leads to the most immediate reward, and (2) use extramaze or intramaze cues to find reward location on the maze.