A special issue in honor of Irene Pepperberg: The chemist of comparative cognition
Published in Learning & Behavior
Awareness of danger inside the egg: Evidence of innate and learned predator recognition in cuttlefish embryos
Published in Learning & Behavior
Predation can be a very strong selective pressure on prey. Many studies have shown the existence of innate anti-predator responses, mostly in the early developmental stages of juvenile vertebrates. Learning to recognize predators is another possible defensive resource, but such a method involves a high death risk. There is evidence that prenatal le...
Asking for help: Do dogs take into account prior experiences with people?
Published in Learning & Behavior
When confronted with a difficult or impossible problem, dogs tend to look back at humans and try to catch their attention, instead of trying to solve it themselves. This behavior has been interpreted as a help request, but it is debated whether dogs take into account prior experiences with people when selecting whom to turn to. In the present study...
Social housing enhances acquisition of task set independently of environmental enrichment: A longitudinal study in the B...
Published in Learning & Behavior
Human studies suggest that healthy social relationships benefit cognition, yet little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of this protective effect. In rodents, studies on acute isolation and environmental enrichment (EE) confirm the importance of social exposure. Despite the widely recognized importance of sociality, however, rodent mo...
Exploring the potential impact of relational coherence on persistent rule-following: The first study
Published in Learning & Behavior
Rule-governed behavior and derived relational responding have both been identified as important variables in human learning. Recent developments in the relational frame theory (RFT) have outlined a number of key variables of potential importance when analyzing the dynamics involved in derived relational responding. Recent research has explored the ...
Outcome expectancy and suboptimal risky choice in nonhuman primates
Published in Learning & Behavior
Animals will favor a risky option when a stimulus signaling reward bridges the choice and the outcome. The present experiments investigated signal-induced risky choices and reward-outcome expectations in rhesus and capuchin monkeys. Risky choice was assessed by preference for a large-probabilistic reward over a modest-certain reward. Outcome expect...
Appetitive conditioning task in a shuttle box and its comparison with the active avoidance paradigm
Published in Learning & Behavior
The main features of the Shuttle Box Active Avoidance paradigm (e.g., the use of simple locomotor response as an operant and electrical current as a primary reinforcer) make this task easily automated. However, learning in this paradigm cannot be easily separated from the specificity of fear motivation. Punishment and negative reinforcement highly ...
Development of point following behaviors in shelter dogs
Published in Learning & Behavior
Pet dogs are known to be responsive to human pointing gestures, but shelter dogs have repeatedly demonstrated poor abilities to follow human pointing, although they can be explicitly trained quickly. This study evaluated the time course in which shelter dogs learn to follow points without explicit training, when given typical interactions with huma...
Is symmetry inference an essential component of language?
Published in Learning & Behavior
Symmetry inference—that is, spontaneously deriving the stimulus association B-A from A-B—was recently reported in preverbal infants (Kabdebon & Dehaene-Lambertz, 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116[12], 5805–5810) and regarded as a “building block for human cognition.” Here, we argue that empir...
Biotremology in arthropods
Published in Learning & Behavior
Effective communication is essential in animal life to allow fundamental behavioral processes and survival. Communicating by surface-borne vibrations is likely the most ancient mode of getting and exchanging information in both invertebrates and vertebrates. In this review, we concentrate on the use of vibrational communication in arthropods as a f...
