Learning & Behavior最新文献

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.

Professor Nicola Clayton is perhaps best known for her work on food-caching scrub jays. Her seminal 1998 paper, together with Anthony Dickinson, showed that scrub jays could remember what food they had cached, where and how long ago, suggesting memory ability that is 'episodic-like' in nature. Here, we present data from a previously unpublished study that sought to replicate and extend these findings. The results replicate previous findings and address potential alternative explanations for earlier results. We argue that the controlled behavioural analyses introduced in this study have the potential to add nuance to our understanding of memory in scrub jay cache retrieval, and to inspire new studies exploring this phenomenon, about which we still have so much to learn.

It has been an honor to edit this special issue of Learning & Behavior to recognize the exceptional contributions of Prof. Nicky S. Clayton FRS to the fields of comparative cognition and developmental and experimental psychology. Prof. Clayton has also provided supervision, mentorship, and support for many students, researchers, and colleagues throughout her career, including over 52 PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, helping to pave the way for a generation of future scientists in academia and industry. Indeed, all four of the co-editors on this special issue worked with Prof. Clayton in her Cambridge University Comparative Cognition Lab as PhD candidates and/or postdoctoral researchers (from 2011 to 2022), and we happily continue to collaborate together. Prof. Clayton was awarded the 2024 Comparative Cognition Society (CCS) Research Award and delivered the Master Lecture at the 31st International Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3, April 2024). Dr. Rachael Miller and Prof. Joshua Plotnik (co-editors) co-organized a symposium at the CO3 conference dedicated to Prof. Clayton. The invited symposium speakers were Prof. Mike Beran (Georgia State University), Prof. Jon Crystal (Indiana University), Dr. Christelle Jozet-Alves (Université de Caen Normandie), and Prof. Thomas Bugnyar (University of Vienna). Dr Elias Garcia-Pelegrin (co-editor) served as Master of Ceremony for an evening CO3 banquet, which included a video compilation of "thank you" messages from many of Prof. Clayton's colleagues, students, and friends.

This study explored long-term retention of spatial memory in rats using an eight-arm radial maze. Crystal and Babb (Learning and motivation, 39(4), 278-284, 2008) previously demonstrated that rats could retain spatial memory for up to 25 h in the radial maze. Notably, they found performance improved with 48-h intertrial intervals compared with 24-h intervals. Our study investigated the effects of extending intertrial intervals on long-term retention of spatial memory by reducing the potential for proactive interference. Each trial comprised a learning phase, during which subjects were required to sequentially visit four randomly selected arms, followed by a free-choice test that included all eight arms, conducted after increasing the retention and intertrial intervals. The retention intervals were systematically increased from 1 h to 24, 48, and, ultimately, 72 h, with corresponding intertrial intervals expanding from 24 to 48, 120, and 144 h. Performance significantly surpassed chance levels across all conditions, demonstrating that rats are capable of retaining spatial memory for up to 72 h.

In a noteworthy observation, Godfrey-Smith and colleagues report the first evidence of debris throwing in wild octopuses, including instances where they target conspecifics. Proposing parallels with behaviours observed in select social mammals, this discovery prompts inquiries into the extent of their similarity and the potential role of cognition.

Bielecki et al. Current Biology, 33, 4150-4159, (2023) described new behavioral and physiological paradigms to study associative learning and its neural basis in the Cnidaria Tripedalia cystophora. We discuss the relevance of these findings to further our understanding of the intertwined evolution of cognition and the nervous systems.

In general, animals are known to be sensitive to the immediacy of reinforcers. That is, they are generally impulsive and outcomes that occur in the future are generally heavily discounted. Furthermore, they should prefer alternatives that provide reinforcers that require less rather than greater effort to obtain. In the present research, pigeons were given a choice between (1) obtaining reinforcers on a progressively more difficult schedule of reinforcement; starting with four pecks, then eight pecks, then 16 pecks, then 32 pecks, and finally 64 pecks on each trial, and (2) a color signaling a number of pecks for a single reinforcer: red = six, green = 11, blue = 23, or yellow = 45. If pigeons choose optimally, most of the time they should choose the progressive schedule to obtain five reinforcers rather than switch to a color to receive only one. However, if they are sensitive primarily to the number of pecks to the next reinforcer, they should choose the progressive schedule once before switching to red, twice before switching to green, three times before switching to blue, and four times before switching to yellow. Instead, they systematically switched too early. Rather than choose based on the rate of reinforcement or even based on the time or effort to the next reinforcer, they appear to anticipate that the progressive schedule is going to get more difficult, and they base their choice suboptimally on the serial pattern of the worsening progressive schedule.

The aim of this research was to test the effect of training impure tact versus pure tact and intraverbals on the emergence of new verbal operants (impure tacts), thus establishing a conceptual and methodological differentiation on these operants. This was done by varying the training order of intraverbal or impure tact to analyze and confirm whether or not impure tact is the mere sum of pure tact plus intraverbal and therefore has different functions and consequences in learning. An experiment was conducted with 30 participants randomly assigned to three groups. In Group 1, pure tact plus intraverbal and then impure tact were trained. In Group 3 the training order of these operants was counterbalanced. Group 2 was the control group, training only pure tact plus intraverbal. After the training phases, the emergence of impure tacts was tested. The results of this research indicate that the training of impure tacts favors the emergence of new impure tacts to a greater extent than the training of pure tact plus intraverbal and that they therefore have different functions. It is also shown that variation in the order of presentation of the type of training influences the subsequent emergence of new operants (impure tacts), so that creating a previous history of learning in impure tacts favors emergence even when the intraverbal alone is subsequently trained. This has important implications at both conceptual and methodological levels as it would contribute to the development of more effective language training technologies.

A recent paper Smulders et al., (2023) analyzed results of an experiment in which food-caching coal tits needed to relocate and recover multiple previously made food caches and argued that food caching parids use familiarity and not recollection memory when recovering food caches. The memory task involving recovery of multiple caches in the same trial, however, cannot discriminate between these two memory mechanisms because small birds do not need to recover multiple caches to eat during a single trial. They satiate quickly after eating just the first recovered food cache and quickly lose motivation to search for caches, and can be expected to start exploring noncache locations rather than recovering the remaining caches, which would result in inaccurate memory measurements.