Journal of Experimental Psychology-Animal Learning and Cognition最新文献

The acquisition of instrumental responding can be supported by primary reinforcers or by conditional (also known as secondary) reinforcers that themselves have an association to a primary reinforcer. While primary reinforcement has been heavily studied for the past century, the associative basis of conditioned reinforcement has received comparatively little experimental examination. Yet conditioned reinforcement has been employed as an important behavioral assay in neuroscience studies, and thus an analysis of its associative basis is called for. We evaluated the extent to which an element from a previously trained compound would facilitate conditioned reinforcement. Three groups of rats received Pavlovian conditioning with a visual-auditory compound cue followed by food. After training, a lever was made available that, when pressed, produced the same trained compound (group compound), only the auditory cue (group element), or a novel auditory cue (group control). The rats in group compound pressed the lever at a higher rate than did rats in either group element or group control, demonstrating a strong conditioned reinforcement effect only in group compound. Interestingly, there was almost no difference in responding between group element and group control. The implications of this generalization decrement in conditioned reinforcement are discussed-particularly as they relate to research in behavioral neuroscience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Theories of associative learning often propose that learning is proportional to prediction error, or the difference between expected events and those that occur. Spicer et al. (2020) suggested an alternative, that humans might instead selectively attribute surprising outcomes to cues that they are not confident about, to maintain cue-outcome associations about which they are more confident. Spicer et al. reported three predictive learning experiments, the results of which were consistent with their proposal ("theory protection") rather than a prediction error account (Rescorla, 2001). The four experiments reported here further test theory protection against a prediction error account. Experiments 3 and 4 also test the proposals of Holmes et al. (2019), who suggested a function mapping learning to performance that can explain Spicer et al.'s results using a prediction-error framework. In contrast to the previous study, these experiments were based on inhibition rather than excitation. Participants were trained with a set of cues (represented by letters), each of which was followed by the presence or absence of an outcome (represented by + or -). Following this, a cue that previously caused the outcome (A+) was placed in compound with another cue (B) with an ambiguous causal status (e.g., a novel cue in Experiment 1). This compound (AB-) did not cause the outcome. Participants always learned more about B in the second training phase, despite A always having the greater prediction error. In Experiments 3 and 4, a cue with no apparent prediction error was learned about more than a cue with a large prediction error. Experiment 4 tested participants' relative confidence about the causal status of cues A and B prior to the AB- stage, producing findings that are consistent with theory protection and inconsistent with the predictions of Rescorla, and Holmes et al. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A number of different phenomena in pigeon visual cognition suggest that pigeons do not immediately recognize two identical objects in different locations as being "the same." To examine this question directly, pigeons were trained in an absolute go/no-go discrimination between arbitrary selections from sets of 16 images of paintings by Claude Monet. Of the eight positive stimuli, four always appeared in the same location, whereas the other four appeared equally often in each of two locations; the same was true of the negative stimuli. There was a consistent tendency for stimuli that appeared in a single position to be better discriminated than those that appeared in two positions, although by the end of training this effect was confined to negative stimuli. This result suggests that, for a pigeon, an image's location is one of the bundle of features that define it, and that pigeons need to learn to abstract from that feature rather than doing so automatically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In a simultaneous discrimination, pigeons are presumed to learn to about the correct stimulus, but they may also learn to avoid the incorrect stimulus. Similarly, in a conditional discrimination, they are presumed to learn about the relation between the sample stimulus and the correct comparison stimulus but not about the incorrect comparison stimulus. In the present research, we encouraged pigeons to learn about the incorrect comparison stimulus by increasing, over trials, the number of correct comparison stimuli with one sample, to compare with increasing the number of incorrect comparison stimuli over trials with the other sample. In Experiment 1, using colors and shapes, we found no difference in acquisition between the 2 sample types. However, when we replaced either the correct or incorrect comparison from training with a novel stimulus, the pigeons showed that they had learned to avoid the incorrect comparison when there were multiple correct comparisons and to select the single correct comparison when there were multiple incorrect comparisons. In Experiment 2, using national flags as stimuli, when tested with a novel flag stimulus, once again, the pigeons learned about the single correct comparison but not about the multiple incorrect comparisons. However, with the other sample, they appeared to learn about both the multiple correct comparisons and about the single incorrect comparison. This research indicates that pigeons can show considerable flexibility in what they learn in a conditional discrimination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Rhesus macaques, when trained for several hundred trials on adjacent items in an ordered list (e.g., A > B, B > C, C > D), are able to make accurate transitive inferences (TI) about previously untrained pairs (e.g., A > C, B > D). How that learning unfolds during training, however, is not well understood. We sought to measure the relationship between the amount of TI training and the resulting response accuracy in 4 rhesus macaques using seven-item lists. The training conditions included the absolute minimal case of presenting each of the six adjacent pairs only once prior to testing. We also tested transfer to nonadjacent pairs with 24 and 114 training trials. Because performance during and after small amounts of training is expected to be near chance levels, we developed a descriptive statistical model to estimate potentially subtle learning effects in the presence of much larger random response variability and systematic bias. These results suggest that subjects learned serial order in an incremental fashion. Thus, rather than performing transitive inference by a logical process, serial learning in rhesus macaques proceeds in a manner more akin to a statistical inference, with an initial uncertainty about list position that gradually becomes more accurate as evidence accumulates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).