Published in Learning & Behavior
Two experiments determined the effect of interference training on subsequent spatial learning in a Morris water maze. Rats first learned that a platform was located in a quadrant marked by landmarks A and B. Different groups of rats either continued or reversed that training. In the reversal condition the platform was opposite to the initially trai...
Published in Learning & Behavior
Reactions to a recent study suggesting that cleaner wrasse can pass the mirror self-recognition test (Kohda et al. in PLOS Biology, 17(2), e3000021, 2019) reveal more about scientists’ biases than about self-awareness. Scientists should base conclusions about species’ abilities based on the corpus of data on that species rather than on a single tes...
Published in Learning & behavior
Recent findings from the laboratory of May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Tsao et al. in Nature 561, 57-62, 2018) suggest that episodic time is integrated from experience by a neural population in lateral entorhinal cortex that encodes events in a when-where-what trajectory at multiple time scales. While they provide a window into how the brain represents...
Published in Learning & Behavior
Behavior requires an actor. Two experiments using complex conditional action discriminations examined whether pigeons privilege information related to the digital actor who is engaged in behavior. In Experiment 1, each of two video displays contained a digital model, one an actor engaged in one of two behaviors (Indian dance or martial arts) and on...
Published in Learning & Behavior
Dogs have not only shown different kinds of social learning, from either conspecifics or humans, including do-as-I-do imitation, deferred imitation, and selective imitation, but in two previous studies they have also shown an eagerness to copy causally irrelevant actions. This so-called overimitation is prevalent in humans but is totally absent in ...
Published in Learning & behavior
The sunk cost error is usually ascribed to the "ghost" of past investments, but the "promise-of-a-better-future" account is often difficult to dismiss. The search for the underpinning mechanism(s) is ongoing, but it should go hand-in-hand with a functional account.
Published in Learning & Behavior
Many of the scientists working in the field of ‘animal behaviour’ and especially of ‘animal cognition’ consider the most obvious factors for fitness maximization — for instance, nutritional reward maximization — as the sole motivators when a course of action must be chosen. Sweis, Thomas, and Redish (2018, PLOS Biology, 16(6), e2005853) show that e...
Published in Learning & Behavior
Males of Evarcha culicivora, an East African jumping spider (Salticidae), have bright red faces. Here, we investigated how seeing a red face might influence a male’s behaviour during encounters with another male. We applied black eyeliner to conceal the red on a male’s face and measured the spectral properties of male faces with and without the eye...
Published in Learning & Behavior
It has been suggested that non-verbal transitive inference (if A > B and B > C, then A > C) can be accounted for by associative models. However, little is known about the applicability of such models to primate data. In Experiment 1, we tested the fit of two associative models to primate data from both sequential training, in which the training pai...
Published in Learning & Behavior
In two experiments, we trained pigeons (Columba livia) to sort visual images (obtained by clinical myocardial perfusion imaging techniques) depicting different degrees of human cardiac disfunction (myocardial hypoperfusion of the left ventricle) into normal and abnormal categories by providing food reward only after correct choice responses. Pigeon...
