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.

Rats maintain optimal choice when facing long terminal links in a “suboptimal choice” procedure.
It has been recently reported that rats’ optimal behavior in the “suboptimal choice” procedure is eliminated when the duration of the terminal links is increased to 30 s or more (Cunningham & Shahan, 2019). The main goal of the present study is to analyze the generality of such results, via a procedure that has been extensively used in the study of rats’ performance in this task. In Experiment 1, nine rats were exposed to a procedure that presented levers as discriminative stimuli, varying the duration of their presentation from 10 s to 50 s across conditions. The results showed that rats preferred the optimal alte...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Reinforcer predictability and stimulus salience promote discriminated habit learning.
Instrumental (operant) behavior can be goal directed, but after extended practice it can become a habit triggered by environmental stimuli. There is little information, however, about the variables that encourage habit learning, or about the development of discriminated habits that are actually triggered by specific stimuli. (Most studies of habit in animal learning have used free-operant methods.) In the present experiments, rats received training in which a lever press was reinforced only in the presence of a discrete stimulus (S) and the status of the behavior as goal-directed or habitual was determined by reinforcer de...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Base rates bias performance in a temporal bisection task.
We investigated how base rates affect temporal discrimination. In a temporal bisection task, pigeons learned to choose one key after a short sample and another key after a long sample. When presented with a range of intermediate samples they produced a psychometric function characterized by a bias and a scale parameter. When one of the trained samples was more frequent than the other, only the location parameter changed, with the pigeons biasing their choices toward the key associated with the most frequent sample. We then reproduced the bisection task in a long operant chamber, with choice keys far apart, and tracked the ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Pigeons proficiently switch among four tasks without cost.
Both humans and pigeons are highly adept at task switching. However, unlike humans, pigeons do not show measurable switch costs: decreased accuracy and/or increased response times when required to switch tasks on successive trials. This striking disparity suggests that humans and pigeons may succeed at task switching via different means: humans may rely on a combination of executive control and associative learning, whereas pigeons may rely solely on associative learning. Here, we further explored the limits of pigeons’ associative learning in an expanded task-switching paradigm. We trained pigeons to switch among four t...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Concurrent evidence of extinction making acquisition context specific and ABA and ABC renewal effects in human predictive learning.
Two experiments evaluated whether the experience of extinction makes acquisition context specific (EMACS) while the extinction learning itself also becomes context dependent under ABA and ABC renewal designs in a human predictive learning situation. Two groups of participants received X-Outcome pairings in context A followed by P-Outcome pairings in context B. For participants in group E, cue X was then extinguished in context B while cue P was trained. Participants in group NE were trained with P, but they did not have the extinction experience. Testing target cues outside the context B (i.e. the context in which P was tr...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Sucrose-based flavor preferences in rats: Factors affecting detection of extinction.
Rats that have consumed a novel target flavor added to a sucrose solution will develop a preference for that flavor. Such preferences appear to persist over the course of many presentations of the flavor alone when animals are not food-deprived. However, previous research indicates that an extinction effect (a reduction in preference) can be obtained when training or testing is carried out in animals that are hungry. In a series of experiments that produced flavor preferences in hungry rats by adding the flavor to a sucrose solution, three (Experiments 1, 2A, 2B) established that the concentration of sucrose and the nature...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Response reduction and stimulus pre-exposure effects in a human conditioning method.
Two experiments with humans determined whether reduced conditioning following pre-exposure to the conditioned stimulus could be explained by conditioned inhibition (Experiment 1 [E1]) or extinction of responding that the conditioned stimulus (CS) might elicit during pre-exposure (Experiment 2 [E2]). In a video game task (Nelson et al., 2014), participants learned to respond to lights that signaled attacking spaceships. In E1, a red light was either pre-exposed or not pre-exposed between groups prior to conditioning with a green light. Summation tests of red combined with green produced no evidence of conditioned inhibition...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Latent inhibition is facilitated when a target stimulus is preexposed in compound with a nontarget stimulus, but only when the two stimuli coterminate: A test of the Hall-Rodriguez theory.
The Hall-Rodriguez (Hall & Rodriguez, 2010) theory predicts that latent inhibition can be facilitated when a target stimulus is preexposed in compound with a second, nontarget stimulus: specifically, latent inhibition will be facilitated when the target coterminates with the second stimulus in preexposure, but facilitation will fail to occur when the two stimuli do not coterminate. The present study tested these predictions. In each experiment, rats were preexposed to a 30 s target stimulus alone or in compound with a second stimulus across its final 10 s, or they were preexposed to the context. All rats were then exposed ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - July 15, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Abstract-concept learning in two species of new world corvids, pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus Cyanocephalus) and California scrub jays (Aphelocoma Californica).
concepts require individuals to identify relationships between novel stimuli. Previous studies have reported that the ability to learn abstract concepts is found in a wide range of species. In regard to a same/different concept, Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) and black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia), two corvid species, were shown to outperform other avian and primate species (Wright et al., 2017). Two additional corvid species, pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) and California scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) chosen as they belong to a different clade than nutcrackers and magpies, were examined using...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - June 3, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Matching-to-sample abstract-concept learning by dogs (Canis familiaris).
The abstract concept of sameness forms the basis of higher-order cognitive operations, including mathematics and language. Historically believed to be unique to humans, evidence of abstract-concept learning in recent decades has been demonstrated in a range of phylogenetically diverse species, indicating that the ability to judge sameness relations is a general process resulting from convergent evolution. However, to date, no research has demonstrated evidence of such learning in any canid species. We trained domestic dogs (n = 6) on a two-choice olfactory matching-to-sample task using a training set of 48 odors in trial-u...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - March 18, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on perceptual learning for upright faces and its role in the composite face effect.
In the 3 experiments reported here we show that a specific neurostimulation method, whose influence can be understood in terms of a well-known theory of stimulus representation, is able to affect face recognition skills by impairing participants’ performance for upright faces. We used the transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) procedure we have recently developed that allows perceptual learning, as indexed by the face inversion effect, to be modulated. We extended this tDCS procedure to another phenomenon, the composite face effect, which constitutes better recognition of the top half of an upright face when conj...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 1, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Latent inhibition in young children: A developmental effect?
Previous research by Kaniel & Lubow in 1986 found that young children (aged 4–5 years) exhibited poorer learning (latent inhibition) to preexposed stimuli than older children (aged 7–10 years). The aim of our research was to develop a computer-based, child-friendly study that would replicate and extend the work of Kaniel & Lubow in a way that ruled out other, attention-based explanations of their effect. One hundred and four children and 32 undergraduate students took part in our experiment. This consisted of a preexposure/study phase in which participants were asked to press computer keys in response to clipart pictur...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 1, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Preexposure along a continuum: Differentiation and association.
In 5 experiments, we assessed the effects of preexposure to simple auditory stimuli on subsequent conditioning and discrimination learning. Experiment 1 showed that preexposure to a single stimulus retarded acquisition of conditioned responding to that stimulus. The same preexposure regimen facilitated the subsequent acquisition of a discrimination between 2 stimuli that flanked the preexposed stimulus along the frequency dimension. Experiment 2 replicated this midpoint preexposure effect on discrimination learning but also found that alternating preexposure to the discriminative stimuli retarded discrimination learning. E...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 1, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Mechanisms of perceptual learning: Prolonged intermixed preexposure reduces the effectiveness of the unique and the common elements.
In three experiments, rats were given intermixed or blocked preexposure to two similar compound stimuli, AX and BX. In Experiment 1, following preexposure, animals were given appetitive conditioning training with the compound AX. A subsequent generalization test showed better discrimination between AX and BX in the group given intermixed than in the one given blocked preexposure. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the nature of the learning mechanisms underlying this instance of the perceptual learning effect. Experiment 2 assessed the associability of the common and unique elements (X and A); animals in the group given intermix...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 1, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Reconsidering the ability of the stimulus unique features to capture attention: Evidence from change blindness and visual search paradigms.
In Experiment 1 (change blindness), participants received either intermixed or blocked presentations of two visual stimuli that contained several common (X) and unique (A or B) features. On the critical trial after exposure, the stimulus AX was presented but included an unexpected visual event (a change in the size of a stimulus feature). We found that participants readily detected the change when it involved an A-unique feature that had been preexposed intermixed. However, if the change involved an A-unique feature preexposed in blocks, or an X-common feature (preexposed either intermixed or in blocks), the level of the d...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 1, 2021 Category: Zoology Source Type: research