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.

Unihemispheric evidence accumulation in pigeons.
Perceptual decision making involves choices between alternatives based on sensory information. Studies in primates and rodents revealed a stochastic perceptual evidence accumulation process that, after reaching threshold, results in action execution. Birds represent a cognitively highly successful vertebrate class that has been evolving independent from mammals for more than 300 million years. The present study investigated whether perceptual decision making in pigeons shows behavioral and computational dynamics comparable to those in mammals and rodents. Using a novel “pigeon helmet” with liquid shutter displays that ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Adaptive testing of the critical features in 2D-shape discrimination by pigeons and starlings.
An innovative adaptive discrimination procedure examined how two bird species, pigeons and starlings, recognize and discriminate two-dimensional (2D) visual shapes. Prior results suggest a comparative divergence between mammals and birds in their relative reliance on vertices versus line segments to mediate discrimination. To address this potentially important difference, four pigeons and five starlings were tested with a square versus triangle discrimination in two experiments. An adaptive genetic algorithm guided the selection and organization of the training and test stimuli. Both species showed considerable flexibility...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Mice (Mus musculus) do not perceive emergent gestalt.
We have previously demonstrated that chimpanzees, similar to humans, can discriminate the orientations of a diagonal line better when lines are presented in redundant contexts than alone. In the present study, we examined whether the same redundant context facilitated diagonal-orientation discrimination in mice. Mice were presented one of three simultaneous, diagonal-orientation discrimination tasks: (a) presented alone, (b) presented with the context that resulted in emergent configurations in chimpanzees and humans, and (c) presented with the context not resulting in emergent configurations in chimpanzees or humans. In c...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.
Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the improvement of cultural traits over generations via social transmission, is widely believed to be unique to humans. The capacity to build upon others’ knowledge, technologies, and skills has produced the most diverse and sophisticated technological repertoire in the animal kingdom. Yet, inconsistency in both the definitions and criteria used to determine CCE and the methodology used to examine it across studies may be hindering our ability to determine which aspects are unique to humans. Issues regarding how improvement is defined and measured and whether some criteria are empiric...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Where association ends. A review of associative learning in invertebrates, plants and protista, and a reflection on its limits.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Minimal Cognition approach has emerged vigorously, focusing on the study of the adaptive behavior of the simplest organisms, including bacteria, assuming that they are sentient and information-processing entities. Although Minimal Cognition has occasionally used Pavlovian methods to try to demonstrate Associative Learning, neither the Psychology of Learning nor the Comparative Psychology traditions are prominent in the movement. However, the Psychology of Learning approach, with its highly sophisticated experimental designs, has done a great deal of research on Associative Learn...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Does cognition differ across species, and how do we know? Lessons from research in transitive inference.
Comparative psychologists study cognition by characterizing the behavior of individual species and explicitly comparing behavior across species. We use the extensive comparative literature on transitive inference (TI) as a case study to evaluate four central methodological questions that continue to be debated in the field of comparative psychology: 1) Are contextual variables sufficient to explain species differences in cognition? 2) Can cognitive performance be accounted for by associative processes alone? 3) Can we determine the cognitive mechanisms by which animals solve tasks? and 4) What is the role of ecologically d...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Comparative cognition—Conceptual and methodological advancements.
This special issue originally placed a Call for Papers that emphasized the importance of “Conceptual and Methodological” advances in the field of Comparative Cognition. Represented here is a collection of 14 papers that helps to display some of the diversity of ideas and approaches within this flourishing research area. The first paper in this issue, by Gazes and Lazareva (2021), discusses transitive inference learning from the perspectives of: identifying the problems of contextual variables in studying different species; whether associative processes can or cannot fully account for the behavior and, if not, what alte...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - October 7, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Two-item conditional same�different categorization in pigeons: Finding differences.
Research on same�different categorization has shown that mastery of tasks of this kind can be strongly affected by the number of items in the training arrays�for both humans and nonhuman animals. Evidence for two-item same�different categorization in pigeons is decidedly mixed: although some investigations have succeeded, others have failed. To date, no research has documented successful conditional same�different categorization using just two items, nor has research explored how pigeons� responses in this paradigm might be influenced by perceptual characteristics of the training stimuli. Through a series of methodological...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 13, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Effect of context on the instrumental reinforcer devaluation effect produced by taste-aversion learning.
Four experiments manipulated the context in which taste-aversion conditioning occurred when the reinforcer was devalued after instrumental learning. In all experiments, rats learned to lever press in an operant conditioning chamber and then had an aversion to the food-pellet reinforcer conditioned by pairing it with lithium chloride (LiCl) in either that context or a different context. Lever pressing was then tested in extinction to assess its status as a goal-directed action. In Experiment 1, aversion conditioning in the operant conditioning chamber suppressed lever-pressing during the test, but aversion conditioning in t...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 13, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Two-item conditional same–different categorization in pigeons: Finding differences.
Research on same–different categorization has shown that mastery of tasks of this kind can be strongly affected by the number of items in the training arrays—for both humans and nonhuman animals. Evidence for two-item same–different categorization in pigeons is decidedly mixed: although some investigations have succeeded, others have failed. To date, no research has documented successful conditional same–different categorization using just two items, nor has research explored how pigeons’ responses in this paradigm might be influenced by perceptual characteristics of the training stimuli. Through a series of meth...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 13, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Constantly timing, but not always controlled by time: Evidence from the midsession reversal task.
We used a midsession reversal task to investigate how temporal and situational cues may combine to determine choice in frequently changing environments. Pigeons learned a simultaneous discrimination with 2 stimuli: S1 and S2. Choices of S1 were reinforced only during the first trials, and choices of S2 were reinforced only during the last trials of the session, that is, the reinforcement contingencies reversed once during the session. To weaken the temporal cue (time into the session) that signaled the reversal trial, we varied the location of reversal trial randomly across sessions; to weaken the situational cue (the outc...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 13, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Flexible conditional discrimination learning: Pigeons can learn to select the correct comparison stimulus, reject the incorrect comparison, or both.
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 ot...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 2, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Rats delay gratification during a time-based diminishing returns task.
The rat is a common animal model used to uncover the neural underpinnings of decision making and their disruption in psychiatric illness. Here, we ask if rats can perform a decision-making task that assesses self-control by delayed gratification in the context of diminishing returns. In this task, rats could choose to press one of two levers. One lever was associated with a fixed delay (FD) schedule that delivered reward after a fixed time delay (10 s). The other lever was associated with a progressive delay (PD) schedule; the delay increased by a fixed amount of time (1 s) after each PD lever press. Rats were tested under...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - September 2, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Similarities and differences: Comment on Chan et al. (2021).
Spicer et al. (2020) reported a series of causal learning experiments in which participants appeared to learn most readily about cues when they were not certain of their causal status and proposed that their results were a consequence of participants’ use of theory protection. In the present issue, Chan et al. (2021) present an alternative view, using a modification of Rescorla and Wagner’s (1972) influential model of learning. Although the explanation offered by Chan et al. appears very different from that suggested by Spicer et al., there are conceptual commonalities. Here we briefly discuss the similarities and diff...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Protecting the Rescorla–Wagner (1972) theory: A reply to Spicer et al. (2020).
Rescorla (2001) used the compound test procedure to compare associative changes to cues located at different points on a performance scale. He found that associative changes to cues conditioned in compound are not necessarily equal, as predicted by common error term theories like Rescorla and Wagner (1972), but instead are larger for the poorer predictor of a trial outcome. Hence, Rescorla proposed a modification to the Rescorla–Wagner model whereby associative change is calculated as the product of 2 error terms: a common error term, as in the original model, and a unique error term for each cue present, which accounts ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research