Gomes-Ng, Stephanie Elliffe, Douglas Cowie, Sarah
Published in
Learning & Behavior
Previous research suggests that organisms allocate more attention to stimuli associated with higher reinforcer rates. This finding has been replicated several times when stimuli are trained together as compounds, but not in other procedures. Thus, the generality of the relation between relative reinforcer rates and divided attention is not well est...
Amici, Federica
Published in
Learning & behavior
Proops, Grounds, Smith, and McComb (2018) suggest that horses remember previous emotional expressions of specific humans, and use these memories to adjust their behavior in future social interactions. Despite some methodological shortcomings, this study raises important questions on the complexity of social interactions in nonhuman animals, which s...
Blaisdell, Aaron P.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
When we open our eyes, we see a world filled with objects and events. Yet, due to occlusion of some objects by others, we only have partial perceptual access to the events that transpire around us. I discuss the body of research on mental imagery in animals. I first cover prior studies of mental rotation in pigeons and imagery using working memory ...
Bond, Alan B.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
The snake alarm call of Japanese tits prompts nesting adults to search for and mob the reptile until it is driven away. From playback experiments, Suzuki (2018) has inferred that the call provides an associative cue, evoking a searching image of the salient visual features of the predator—a novel approach to exploring visual attention and vocal com...
Cordony, Maximilian B. L. Chow, Julie Y. L. Boakes, Robert A.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
When laboratory rats are given repeated access to an activity wheel, the amount that they run steadily increases. This suggests an analogy with drug dependency in animals and humans, in that this is marked by both increasing intakes of the drug and increasing motivation to obtain the drug (craving). This analogy was examined by measuring motivation...
Sturdy, Christopher B. Congdon, Jenna V.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
Suzuki (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 115, 1541-1545, 2018) conducted elegant field experiments examining referential communication in Japanese tits. Bond (Learning & Behavior, in press, 2019) explains some key considerations and future experimentation that should be conducted to solidify these conclusions. An important takeaway f...
Morillas, Enrique González, Felisa Hall, Geoffrey
Published in
Learning & Behavior
In two experiments, rats received pairings of an almond flavor (Experiments 1 and 2B) or a vanilla flavor (Experiment 2A) with sucrose. In each experiment, half of the rats received prior exposure to the flavor and half were exposed to water. Conditioned preference was then assessed through two-bottle, flavor versus water, choice tests. Latent inhi...
Chamizo, V. D. Torres, M. N. Rodríguez, C. A. Mackintosh, N. J.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
In three experiments, rats of different ages were trained in a circular pool to find a hidden platform whose location was defined in terms of a single landmark, a cylinder outside the pool. Following training, two main components of the landmark, its shape and pattern, were tested individually. Experiment 1 was performed by adolescent and adult rat...
Polack, Cody W. Miller, Ralph R.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
Exposure to a set of complex stimuli yields an enhanced ability to discriminate between these stimuli. In previous experimental studies, two distinguishable stimuli, X and A, were each repeatedly paired with a common Stimulus B to create compound Stimuli XB and AB. Prior evidence suggests that unique Features X and A form mutually inhibitory associ...
Roberts, William A.
Published in
Learning & Behavior
Past research has shown that testing memory in the same context in which the memory was encoded leads to improved retention relative to testing memory in a new context. Context-dependent memory is directly related to the extent to which the encoding context can be reproduced. An experiment with pigeons is reported in which the context was a colored...
