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.

Blocking is not ‘pure’ cue competition: Renewal-like effects in forward and backward blocking indicate contributions by associative cue interference.
Discussion considers whether stimulus competition and associative interference are two independent phenomena or products of a single underlying process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes)
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 28, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Location as a feature in pigeons’ recognition of visual objects.
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 ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 10, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The effects of stimulus pre-exposure and conditioning on overt visual attention.
Three experiments (a, b, c) combined to provide a well-powered examination of the effects of stimulus pre-exposure and conditioning on visual attention using an eye tracker and a space-shooter video game where a colored flashing light predicted an attacking spaceship. In each, group “control” received no pre-exposure to the light, group “same” received pre-exposure in the same context as conditioning, and group “different” received pre-exposure in a different context. Experiments differed in visual details regarding the game (1a vs. 1b and 1c) or minor details in the setup of the eye tracker (1a and 1b vs. 1c)....
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 10, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Theory protection: Do humans protect existing associative links?
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...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 10, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Transitive inference after minimal training in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).
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 pair...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - December 2, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The role of inhibition in the suboptimal choice task.
Given a choice, pigeons prefer an initial-link stimulus that is followed by reliable signals that food will be delivered (S+) or not (S−) after a delay, over an alternative initial-link stimulus that is followed by unreliable signals of food, even when the former yields a lower overall probability of food. This suboptimal preference has been attributed to the combination of a biased attraction to the S+ and ignoring the S−. We evaluated the inhibitory properties of the S− in three experiments to investigate its role in suboptimal choice. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained in an autoshaping procedure with the four ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - December 2, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Elements of a compound elicit little conditioned reinforcement.
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 compoun...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - November 29, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Nonreactive testing: Evaluating the effect of withholding feedback in predictive learning.
Learning of cue-outcome relationships in associative learning experiments is often assessed by presenting cues without feedback about the outcome and informing participants to expect no outcomes to occur. The rationale is that this “no-feedback” testing procedure prevents new learning during testing that might contaminate the later test trials. We tested this assumption in 4 predictive learning experiments where participants were tasked with learning which foods (cues) were causing allergic reactions (the outcome) in a fictitious patient. We found that withholding feedback in a block of trials had no effect on causal r...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - November 29, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Use of different attentional strategies by pigeons and humans in multidimensional visual search.
To study comparative attentional allocation strategies, pigeons and humans were tested using simultaneously available discrimination tasks. Given visual search displays containing 32 items from two orthogonal dimensions, participants were reinforced for selecting the eight brightest (or darkest) of 16 brightness items and the eight most vertical (or horizontal) of 16 orientation items. Consistent with a sequential dimensional strategy, humans preferentially chose items from one dimension before switching to the other to complete the search. In contrast, the pigeons did not preferentially stay within one dimension over cons...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - November 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Focusing and shifting attention in pigeon category learning.
Adaptively and flexibly modifying one’s behavior depending on the current demands of the situation is a hallmark of executive function. Here, we examined whether pigeons could flexibly shift their attention from one set of features that were relevant in one categorization task to another set of features that were relevant in a second categorization task. Critically, members of both sets of features were available on every training trial, thereby requiring that attention be adaptively deployed on a trial-by-trial basis based on contextual information. The pigeons not only learned to correctly categorize the stimuli but, a...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Controlling for dogs’ (Canis familiaris) use of nonmnemonic strategies in a spatial working memory task.
Short assessments of spatial working memory (SWM) in dogs are becoming popular evaluations of canine aging and individual differences. In a typical SWM task, an experimenter hides a reward inside of a bucket at a specific stimulus position while the dog watches. Then, following a varying delay interval, the dog is released to choose a bucket. The longest delay at which the dog can successfully choose the bucket containing the reward is considered to reflect the dog’s SWM duration. Although past studies were informative, the tasks often lacked a valid measure of SWM due to dogs’ ability to use nonmnemonic strategies, su...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Can we study episodic-like memory in preschoolers from an animal foraging model?
Episodic-like memory (ELM) involves remembering the what, where, and when (WWW) of an event as a whole, and it can be studied behaviorally. In research regarding this type of memory with children, one experiment proposes a new task adapted from animal foraging studies. A task derived from a foraging model was presented its considers the characteristics required for ELM study in children and employs a single trial presented from an egocentric perspective to avoid memory consolidation. One study compared four-year-old children's choices after being trained with one or three trials using a hide-and-seek task. The consequence ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Evaluating evidence from animal models of episodic memory.
A fundamental question in comparative cognition concerns the ability to remember back in time to an earlier event or episode. This ability is referred to as episodic memory. Whether nonhumans can be used to model human episodic memory has engendered much interest and debate for over 2 decades. The central hypothesis of an animal model of episodic memory is that, at the moment of the memory assessment, the animal remembers back in time to a specific earlier event or episode. I describe (a) an approach for evaluating evidence of episodic memory in animal models (b) what aspects of episodic memory are being modeled in animals...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Assessment of the ‘timing’ function of schedule-induced behavior on fixed-interval performance.
It has been suggested that schedule-induced behaviors allow organisms to adapt better to temporal regularities of the environment. The main goal of the present study was to observe the effect of schedule-induced drinking (SID) on the performance in fixed-interval (FI) schedules. Rats were exposed to a FI 15-, 30-, or 60-s food reinforcement schedule, and only half of them had access to water in the experimental chamber. Rats with access to water developed SID, which occurred in the first part of the interval, regardless of the FI value, and was followed by an increase in lever pressing rate. There were no substantial diffe...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Extending a misallocation model to children’s choice behavior.
Nonhuman animal models show that reinforcers control behavior through what they signal about the likelihood of future events, but such control is generally imperfect. Imperfect control by the relation between past and likely future events may result from imperfect detection of those events as they occur, which result in imperfect detection of the relation between events. Such an approach would suggest the involvement of more complex psychological processes like memory in simple operant learning. We extended a research paradigm previously examined with nonhuman animals to test the ability of a quantitative model that assume...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research