Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Testing principal- versus medial-axis accounts of global spatial reorientation.
Determination of a direction of travel is a necessary component of successful navigation, and various species appear to use the geometric shape (global geometric cues) of an environment to determine direction. Yet, debate remains concerning which objective shape parameter is responsible for spatial reorientation via global geometric cues. For example, the principal axis of space, which runs through the centroid and approximate length of the space, and the medial axis of space, a trunk and branch system that fills the shape, have each been suggested as a basis to explain global spatial reorientation. As the principal- and m...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 19, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Social learning and associative processes: A synthesis.
Social learning is often considered different from asocial learning in both its characteristics and mechanisms. I presented pigeons with a concurrent discrimination task in which they received artificial social information, consisting of simple shapes that distributed themselves between two options similarly to how conspecifics might. Subjects in some conditions combined personal information about the two options with this social-like information, but subjects in conditions in which personal information was very reliable ignored the social cues, much like cases in which animals only choose to copy choices of others under c...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 19, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Pigeons in control of their actions: Learning and performance in stop-signal and change-signal tasks.
In human participants, 2 paradigms commonly assumed to measure the executive-control processes involved in response inhibition are the stop-signal and change-signal tasks. There is, however, also considerable evidence that performance in these tasks can be mediated by associative processes. To assess which components of inhibitory response control might be associative, we developed analogues of these tasks for pigeons. We trained pigeons to peck quickly at 1 of 2 keys of different colors to obtain a food reward. On some trials, the rewarded key was replaced (after a varying interval) by a signal of a different color. For s...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Variety overcomes the specificity of cue-potentiated feeding in rats.
Cue-potentiated feeding (CPF) describes the stimulation of food consumption by cues that have become associated with food. Determining under what Conditions CPF occurs is important to better understand how exposure to food cues contributes to overeating. CPF is typically found to be specific: cues enhance consumption only of the food they have signaled. Further, previous research has focused largely on discrete cues rather than multimodal cues such as a feeding environment. The present experiments paired a “Plus” context with highly palatable food and a “Minus” context with no food or chow in adult female rats. Exp...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Individual differences are more than a gene × environment interaction: The role of learning.
We present a case that: (a) individual differences in behavior emerge, in part, from principles of learning; (b) associations provide a descriptive mechanism for understanding the contribution of experience to behavior; and (c) learning theories explain dissociable aspects of behavior. We use 4 examples from the field of learning to illustrate the importance of involving psychology, and associative theory in particular, in the analysis of individual differences, these are (a) fear learning; (b) behavior directed to cues for outcomes (i.e., sign- and goal- tracking); (c) stimulus learning related to attention; and (d) human...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The probability of reinforcement per trial affects posttrial responding and subsequent extinction but not within-trial responding.
During magazine approach conditioning, rats do not discriminate between a conditional stimulus (CS) that is consistently reinforced with food and a CS that is occasionally (partially) reinforced, as long as the CSs have the same overall reinforcement rate per second. This implies that rats are indifferent to the probability of reinforcement per trial. However, in the same rats, the per-trial reinforcement rate will affect subsequent extinction—responding extinguishes more rapidly for a CS that was consistently reinforced than for a partially reinforced CS. Here, we trained rats with consistently and partially reinforced ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Suboptimal choice, reward-predictive signals, and temporal information.
Suboptimal choice refers to preference for an alternative offering a low probability of food (suboptimal alternative) over an alternative offering a higher probability of food (optimal alternative). Numerous studies have found that stimuli signaling probabilistic food play a critical role in the development and maintenance of suboptimal choice. However, there is still much debate about how to characterize how these stimuli influence suboptimal choice. There is substantial evidence that the temporal information conveyed by a food-predictive signal governs its function as both a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus and as an instr...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 11, 2018 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Psychophysics of associative learning: Quantitative properties of subjective contingency.
Allan and collaborators (Allan, Hannah, Crump, & Siegel, 2008; Allan, Siegel, & Tangen, 2005; Siegel, Allan, Hannah, & Crump, 2009) recently proposed to apply signal detection theory to the analysis of contingency judgment tasks. When exposed to a flow of stimuli, participants are asked to judge whether there is a contingent relation between a cue and an outcome, that is, whether the subjective cue–outcome contingency exceeds a decision threshold. In this context, we tested the following hypotheses regarding the relation between objective and subjective cue–outcome contingency: (a) The underlying distributions of subje...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - November 20, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Serial decision-making in monkeys during an oculomotor task.
Much of everyday behavior involves serial decision-making, in which the outcome of 1 choice affects another. An example is setting rules for oneself: choosing a behavioral rule guides appropriate choices in the future. How the brain links decisions across time is poorly understood. Neural mechanisms could be studied in monkeys, as it is known that they can select and use behavioral rules, but existing psychophysical paradigms are poorly suited for the constraints of neurophysiology. Therefore, we designed a streamlined task that requires sequential, linked decisions, and trained 2 rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) to perform...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 16, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Dealing with interference: Chimpanzees respond to conflicting cues in a food-choice memory task.
Interference effects emerge when responding on the basis of task-relevant features is directly pitted against task-irrelevant cues that could lead to errors. To study potential interference effects in a food-choice memory test, 3 chimpanzees were presented with conflicting information in a magnitude judgment task. In Experiment 1, chimpanzees were presented with an ordinal series of colored containers that they sequenced on the basis of relative preference for the different foods that were consistently hidden under the containers. Chimpanzees also were presented with a relative quantity judgment task in which they saw iden...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 5, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Learned predictiveness and outcome predictability effects are not simply two sides of the same coin.
The Learned Predictiveness effect refers to the observation that learning about the relationship between a cue and an outcome is influenced by the predictive relevance of the cue for other outcomes. Similarly, the Outcome Predictability effect refers to a recent observation that the previous predictability of an outcome affects learning about this outcome in new situations, too. We hypothesize that both effects may be two manifestations of the same phenomenon and stimuli that have been involved in highly predictive relationships may be learned about faster when they are involved in new relationships regardless of their fun...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 5, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Individual differences: Case studies of rodent and primate intelligence.
Early in the 20th century, individual differences were a central focus of psychologists. By the end of that century, studies of individual differences had become far less common, and attention to these differences played little role in the development of contemporary theory. To illustrate the important role of individual differences, here we consider variations in intelligence as a compelling example. General intelligence (g) has now been demonstrated in at least 2 distinct genera: primates (including humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and tamarins) and rodents (mice and rats). The expression of general intelligence varies wide...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 5, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Ratios and effect size.
Responding to a related pair of measurements is often expressed as a single discrimination ratio. Authors have used various discrimination ratios; yet, little information exists to guide their choice. A second use of ratios is to correct for the influence of a nuisance variable on the measurement of interest. I examine 4 discrimination ratios using simulated data sets. Three ratios, of the form a/(a + b), b/(a + b), and (a − b)/(a + b), introduced distortions to their raw data. The fourth ratio, (b − a)/b largely avoided such distortions and was the most sensitive at detecting statistical differences. Effect size stati...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - August 14, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Competition and facilitation in compound conditioning.
Despite the generality and theoretical relevance of cue competition phenomena such as blocking and overshadowing, recent findings suggest that these observations may be due to some degree of publication bias, and that we lack insight into the boundary conditions of these phenomena. The present commentary does not question the existence of cue competition phenomena. Rather, I review findings showing that 3 variables, namely (a) relative stimulus duration, (b) contingency, and (c) contiguity parametrically determine not only whether cue competition is observed, but also whether no cue interaction, or cue facilitation occur. ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - August 10, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Inhibitory Pavlovian–instrumental transfer in humans.
Although there has been extensive research in both humans and rodents regarding the influence of excitatory predictions on action selection, the influence of inhibitory reward predictions is less well understood. We used a feature-negative conditioned inhibition procedure to generate Pavlovian excitors and inhibitors, predicting the presence or absence of specific outcomes, and assessed their influence on action selection using a Pavlovian–instrumental transfer test. Inhibitors predicting the absence of a specific outcome reversed the bias in action selection elicited by outcome-specific excitors; whereas excitors promot...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - August 3, 2017 Category: Zoology Source Type: research